Plants, in net, capture about 1-3% of available solar energy and convert that to equivalent biomass. Food conversion -- the parts you can eat -- are a small fraction of that.
Herbivores and predators each convert about 10% of the food energy they eat into body mass, for a 90% reduction (approximately) at each trophic level. Grazers lose 90% of the primary plant food energy, first-order predators lose 90% of the herbivore food energy, second-order predators (rare, but they do exist), lose 90% of the first-order predator food energy.
This is known as the trophic or ecological pyramid:
https://www.britannica.com/science/trophic-pyramid
Yes, eating something that can eat what you cannot is a net win. Eating something that eats what you can (most contemporary livestock) is not.
Grains are the core of the human diet, and have been since the dawn of civilization. But they are only edible because of civilization - the grinding, fermentation, and cooking breaking them down into something our bodies can use.
In the US and other wealthy countries, we might feed grain to livestock, but it's also often parts of grain that we can't really eat (hulls, etc). And in poorer countries, livestock are often open-grazed on grasses that are inedible for us. And non-grazers like hogs often eat garbage, food waste that we don't consume.
When farming, the questions are even more complex. The livestock generates manure that fertilizes the fields, so much of that "lost" energy is recovered.
The bulk of livestock feed is corn (which has seen tremendous yield improvements since the 1960s through "green revolution" techniques), and for protein content, soyabeans, which have rather pointedly not.
Additional silage provides some but AFAIU considerably less general nutritive content. And you will absolutely find vast acreages of corn and soyabean in the flyover states destined entirely for livestock feed. Not table crops with the leftovers going to livestock. Fully 100% livestock-dedicated.
Integrated farming operations in which cows run loose amongst the corn and wheat fertilising the fields are ... effectively nonexistant.
Theoretical possibilities are not on-the-ground, in-the-dirt, realities.
If you're talking about thermal efficiency.. what you're saying is true but irrelevant. Whether my food is the optimum use of sunlight is not a real concern.
The alternatives to sustainable, integrated, ecological agricultural methods are "cheaper" because the market doesn't price in the 5-million-years-to-one rate at which we're extracting fossil fuels from the Earth over that at which they'd been put there,[1] of the strip-mining of topsoil at rates 100x - 1000x greater than those at which it had formed, of the natural-gas-fed fixing of atmospheric nitrogen (again at a roughly 5 million:1 ratio of inputs), of the mining of phosphorus, another critical fertiliser (potash is, for the moment, relatively abundant), of the impacts of eutrophication of rivers, wetlands, and oceans near ag-land outflows, of the systemic risks posed by monoculture cultivation, of the systemic ecological impacts of pesticide use, of the destruction of virgin ecosystems and biological diversity, and more.[2]
The "economic" costs are actually financialised costs, which include a long, peculiar, historically-contingent, largely malformed and false worldview model origin, which persists for numerous reasons, largely boiling down to being a highly convenient fiction for contemporary beneficiaries of this particular theology. Though the difficulty in moving to a more accurate, realistic, and one might hope sustainable model is severe. The convenience of the modern lie is profound.
Upshot: "cheaper" is based on invalid models heaped on invalid models. There's a vast unbooked debt accumulating.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....
2. Lev Tolstoy has an early and fascinating discussion of cost accounting and factors of production in What Shall We Do Then (https://archive.org/details/whatshallwedothe00tolsrich/page/...), finding the standard three-factor model of the time, land, labour, and capital, insufficient.
The economic theory seems to derive directly from cost accounting, dating principally to Alexander Hamilton Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_Church). The problem of defining economic theory to guide accounts based on what accounts tallied to inform economists seems ... problematic.
The legal and economic theory of extractive resources has a long, problematic, and almost entirely unscientific history, specifically the Rule of Capture and its logic, and the principle theory of pricing, which though largely dismissed doesn't seem to have found a replacement: Hotelling's Rule.
Now, it's just a matter of time before fossil fuels are no longer an issue - we are rapidly moving to renewable energy. And that will have a significant impact on farming practice, by altering the cost of tillage and transportation. And as these costs accumulate to the point where they enter the financial equation, farming technology will adjust accordingly. That's what the market does.
So what is "sustainability" here? Are we worried that the agricultural system will break so rapidly that it causes massive famines?
To give a concrete example, Google (well, "Alphabet", but really, Google) launched a project whose entire premise and name were "RE<C": renewable energy cheaper than coal.
It failed.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineer...
The problem, if you subscribe to my view, is that the underlying premise was wrong. It's not that renewables are too expensive. It's that the accounting for coal's costs are entirely flawed.
An interesting implication is that if the underlying accounting, tax, and economic model is changed, fossil fuels will be glued to the ground by a force far stronger than gravity: economic fiscal reality.
What are the odds of that happening? Frankly, low. I'm looking to see how much that particular Overton window might swing, however.
Addressing your ag question: Another of my academic remits (both agriculture and economics). There are any of numerous problems, most revolving around various forms of risk. One of my personal collapse scenarios would involve major, possibly multiple simultaneous, crop failures, whether from weather (most likely drought, floods or freezes might also have impacts), disease, a polination collapse, or something similar. There are some food reserves, but those are decidedly finite and would present severe difficulties at mass scale.
Even through the mid-20th century, massive famines resulting in millions of deaths were seen. The most recent major famine was in Bangladesh in 1974 -- the 1980s Ethiopian famines were comparatively mild, despite the worldwide coverage they drew.
Critics of Communism like to point out the Great Famine of China (1959-1961), in which 15-30 million, of a population of about 660 million, died. Roughly 5%. These same critics ignore the 1920s famine under noncommunist Nationalist China, or the numerous 19th century famines under what was largely British control, or the English-exacerbated Great Irish Famine, which saw a fifty percent reduction in the population of Ireland, from a peak still not matched to this day.
Throughout history, famines in which 10%, 30%, or even 90% of populations have died over wide regions have been fairly commonplace.
In a world of global supply chains, massive monocultures, limited self-sufficiency, and vast inequalities of wealth and military power, a recurrance would be an exceedingly notable event.
Though catastrophic collapse isn't the only possibility. The slow yield decline of overworked lands is another possiblity, and again, soil, water, fertiliser, and pest pressures can build with time. Adjustment to such a gradual erosion should be less severe, but still strongly dislocating.
So what are the odds of something like the Irish potato blight happening on a nationwide or worldwide scale, large enough to disrupt a global food supply? Like the entire US corn crop failing all at once? I'm more concerned about genetic monocrops like Gros Michael bananas or rubber trees than I am about rice or wheat. But one country having a bad year? That's not the problem it was.
Slow yield declines is also a concern, but those are likely to be regional and crop-specific. These things can be managed with modern farming techniques - change crops, or use alternate varieties.
And beyond that, I think we have at least one, maybe a couple more agricultural technical revolutions up our sleeves. The first is already underway - detailed sensors monitoring crop quality down to a plant-by-plant level. When integrated with small, inexpensive crop-tending robots, whole new worlds open up. Who needs "Roundup Ready" when robots that can recognize and pull weeds on sight are roaming the fields? The second is also underway... starting with GMO crops, but I think we will cross over to genetically targeted poisons for common pests. There's a lot of potential there.
On the plus side: crop diversity (three or for major staples), regional production, and major transshippment capabilities.
On the negative side, continued massive global inequality, high birthrates in the poorest (and in some cases least agriculturally productive) lands, and a globally interconnected transport (goods, people) network that's phenomenally effective at spreading disease and pests, changing climates and sea levels, and a continued reliance on unsustainable inputs, as well as major increases in plant productivity largely by offloading native disease resistance with artificial supplementation, and, despite the 3-4 major crop diversity, a very high level of monoculture within those.
The main question will be whether a famine will be localised or globalised. As an example, China is buying up cropland rights in Africa now, much as England once did in Ireland, or the US exported colonial crop cultivation in Latin America. If Africa gets hungry again, who eats what is produced? Africa or China?
In several recent historical famines, money and legal institutions and dynamics starved farmers and fed cities, most especially in the Great Irish Famine, Holdomor, and Dust Bowl.
The general problem is one of building an increasingly complex and optimised system until it starts failing critically at multiple points, stressing resouces and knowledge. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (https://www.worldcat.org/title/collapse-of-complex-societies...) gives the general dynamic. Much of the reading on complex systems bolsters his view, as does the study of ancient civilisations. Most of which thought themselves the ultimate pinnacle of progress.
Additional technical means are possible, yes. One of my projects over the past few years has been looking at the mechanisms by which technology works, and the specific capabilities and limitations of these. I've come up with a fairly consistent list of nine:
1. Materials: Substances, minerals, elements, molecules, organics. Provide properties, have associated abundance, cost, and side effects.
2. Fuels: Dispatchable consumable stores of potential energy, largely fossil fuels, biomass, and nuclear. (Stored and kinetic or photovoltaic potential are considered separately: wind, geothermal, hydro, solar.)
3. Process knowlege: Roughly, technology. Domain-specific understanding of how to achieve some ends, independent of other characteristics.
4. Structural knowledge: Roughly, science. Domain-specific understanding of causes and interactions, based on experience, experiment, and observation.
5. Power transmission and transformation: Any communication or conversion of power or energy. Examples: missiles, shafts, rods, gears, electricity, magnetism, beamed energy, batteries.
6. Networks: Structures usefully describable as nodes and links or vertices and edges, whether physical or conceptual, having arity and topology. Examples: transport network, web of knowledge, comms netwok, social netework, land and its varying qualities and capabilities.
7. Systems: Multi-part structures (often networks) with sensing, processing, action, and assessment feedback loops. Roughly, the domains of cybernetics, operations research, or systems theory, in the general, or the topics of most social sciences and management domains.
8. Information: Receiving, parsing, processing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting. Examples: speech, writing, logic, magnetism. Affects focusing activities, managing systems, or disrupting other (or others') systems.
9. Hygiene: Side effects and unintended consequences affecting overall function. Inevitable, often emergent properties, which require mitigation or management.
What this provides is a way of looking at problems (or solutions) and breaking them into components that are not siloed by traditional disciplines (scientific or technological domain silos), hence, they are mechanisms. You get something more useful than "technology is efficiency", or "the power of thought". It's also possible to look at past developments in terms of what contributed to them.
Ag has benefitted hugely from domain-specific knowledge: what plants grow where yielding what requiring what inputs, methods, protections, and processing, and further through hybridisation and now direct genetic manipulation. From energy inputs, especially in supplying water, but also in preparation and transportation. From mechanisation of cultivation -- tractors, combines, and harvesters. From energy- and materials-specific treatments of fertilisers and pesticides.
The biggest changes in 200 years have been the vast reduction in labour inputs (from ~90% of the population to < 2% in most industrialised countries) through mechanisation, and Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis for fertiliser. Hygiene factors -- management and suppression of disease and pests -- has been another major factor, but produced further hygiene effects consequent of pesticide use. Fertiliser overuse is another hygiene effect.
What automated rather than merely mechanised methods can provide is the ability to further reduce labour, though as that's already low on staples, an Amdahl's Law type dynamic kicks in: parallelisation (of labour inputs) is limited by the nonparallelisable portion of your operation, an example of mechanism-specific limitations. You're also pushing utilisation to ever-more marginal land -- there's more of it, yes, but it's frequently more easily damaged, or more subject to swings in climate, hydration, salt intrusion.
And we're left with the bits we cannot readily change: perennial crops can be sown or left fallow, but vine and tree crops require consistent maintenance across years, if not decades and centuries. Topsoil, literally the top few centimetres or metres across large parts of entire countries, is not a factor which can be meaningfully artificially manufactured, though it can be moved or amended, with tremendous effort. Salinisation, desertification, and innundation are threats that can be managed poorly. As are runoff and ecological disruptions from fertiliser and pesticides, or habitat displacement.
TL;DR: Technology lets us approach limits. It does not let us erase them.
Which is why grassfed > cornfed in pretty much every situation except for the extra fat/flavor you might get from cornfed beef. Having cows that consume grass is a win-win. The grass absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere like a feedlot does, the grass is digested better, and manure fertilizes the grass. And when the cows are moved to different pastures and chickens are brought in, they help to agitate the manure into the soil to help that fertilizing process along.
I wish the grassfed beef industry was embraced more instead of people attempting to swear off beef completely.
Cornfed beef is a result of economics, too - it's cheaper to buy corn than use pasture, and/or it produces meat that can sell for higher prices. We don't just see corfed beef for fancy prime steaks. It's used in cheap fast food hamburgers as well.
Fast food and junk food are the cheapest food. They've applied industrial logic to every link in the food chain. If meat was as expensive as vegans argue, we wouldn't see it as the basis of so much fast food.
https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-i... https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day
I don't know if it does or doesn't, but you might want to incorporate that into your model.
(NB: I'm not a vegitarian myself. I'm quite familiar with arguments. And have some familiarity with feedlots.)
The net terrestrial vertebrate biomass has shifted markedly over the past century (and undoubtedly over the previous 50,000 years of the Human Diaspora). What the pre-Columbian American bison population was I have no idea.
Total pre-industrial wildlife biomass ~10,000 BCE, by estimates, was ~1/7 that of the present, and smaller than humans in total:
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Terrestr...
The herds may not have been that big pre-columbus.
This article is false. The Navajo / Clovis Indians never stopped eating meat. They continued to hunt and they raised lamb and goats. Mutton formed a staple of their diet, along with fried bread and goat milk. Clothing was formed from deer skin and yucca fiber. Note, they hunted the deer. And note, they ate the deer. They also ate the yucca, but it wasn't all they ate.
https://navajopeople.org/navajo-food.htm
"The people in this area responded in an interesting way: by focusing much more on gathering, and less on hunting. We know this from their improved tools for processing plants, especially yucca roots."
Just because they improved tools for eating yucca doesn't mean they stopped hunting. Presumably, all of their tools improved, including hunting tools.
They also raised lamb and sheep. I've been to the Taos Pueblo near there, it's 1000 years old and it has a large meat rack centered in the village, for drying meat out for jerky and pemmican.
The caloric density of meat and protein / fat content is much, much higher than found in vegetables...especially wild vegetables.
And no, we don't have the same gut bacteria or digestive tracks as livestock. Sheep, goats, and cows all have four chambered stomachs and are ruminants. They have trillions of microbes in their stomach to process grass and break down cellulose. They also have a digestive tract that is 27 times longer their bodies versus a human's 3 or 4 times length. We couldn't digest grass like them if we tried. Plant foods are much harder to process than animal foods, because of cellulose. The human gut length ratio is similar to an obligate predator like cats.
They'll complain that you're a vegitarian.
Clearly, on one side, we have omnivores. On the other, extra rules about food type and preparation. Its almost always more complicated to feed one, than the other.
The United States no longer has the largest total national carbon footprint. That title now goes to China, which has exploded past the US. The total carbon emissions title, since 1970 (roughly half, probably somewhat more, of the total since the Industrial Revolution, given ~30-ish year doubling rates), remains the US, though China are on track to surpass this within a few years.
Per capita, US residents still have a larger carbon footprint than China.
It's not the largest in the world, though, with that title going, depending on how you allocate, to petroleum exporting regions (e.g., Saudi Arabia), fueling and bunkering centres (e.g., Gibralter), ammonia fertiliser production (e.g., Trinidad and Tobago), or, if you're looking at direct local consumption rather than exports, largely Scandinavian countries with very large heating requirements.
Emissions by country, graph, 1970-present: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
2017 national vs. per-capita emissions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
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Cumulative emissions, 1970-2017: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
The US agricultural system has global implications — from tooling and process, to subsidies and what poor countries grow. A fundamental change in the American diet would have an enormous ripple effect across the globe.
I try to do whatever lifestyle changes I can, but I also use Project Wren (https://projectwren.com/) to offset the remainder of my carbon footprint!
The bulk of present livestock animals raised for food either directly consume feed which could be eaten by humans, or consume feed which grows on land that could be used to grow foods eaten by humans.
Net grazed livestock, especially in the US, is rare. Where such livestock do exist, they tend to be on already marginal lands -- if something better could be grown there it would be. The consequence being that its carrying and feeding capacity is highly limited. And even historical herd-keeping practices have proved highly damaging to long-term land quality, helping in the destruction of forests through much of the middle east, as an example. "The pines of Lebanon" is not just an allegorical phrase.
The split between animals which do effectively forage and those which don't, I'm not immediately aware of, though
Protein per calorie doesn't seem comparable.
Depends on the biotope. In fertile European fields, less meat is much more efficient. In the arctic steppe or in the Sahel, animals are the more efficient way to extract calories from the land (though it doesn't scale to high population densities...)
that's where we are right now so anything that doesn't scale is practically irrelevant
Also, reindeer is one of the most ethical ways of modern husbandry. Animals live out in the wild, supported by humans e.g. adding feed when there is little to eat, protecting them from carnivores etc, and then they are slaughtered in a sustainable way after living close to how they do in their natural state.
A tomato is 16 calories per 100g which cost 50 cents so what, 3 cents per calorie? Did I do that right?
Grains are.
Rice. Wheat. Maize (corn). Rye. Oats. Barley. Millet. A handful of others.
A 50# bag of rice (22.7kg) costs less than $20, and provides 17,800 calories, or about 900 calories per dollar, or about 0.1 cents/calorie.
I see chicken at about $2/lb, 102cal/3oz, or 544 cal/lb. That's 2.7 cents/calorie, 27 times more expensive than rice.
(And for the nutritionists out there: kilocalories are not all that food provides, but it's the most significant start. Macros and micros as well as other factors do matter. I've been told.)
Oh: There are also root crops, especially potatoes.
$ units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-05-31 3460 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units
You have: 2/544 kcal
You want: 0.01/kcal
* 0.36764706
/ 2.72But I was particularly talking about per calorie rather than "per dollar"
It's not about running faster than your vegetarian rival, it's about whether your tribe collapses because there isn't enough food.
Yeah, not all plant matter is food for humans, but if you only had, say, 100 square miles, and you wanted it to support as many humans as possible, how would you allocate resources between hunting and gathering?
The point is not that one choice is better than the other, it's that those who happened to make the right choice at the right time were the ones that survived.
It's relatively rare that living organisms die without being part of some further biological change, though that does happen. Fossil fuels are formed through lack of biological decomposition, as are precursor materials: peat bogs, kerogenated biomass, abiotic methane. Deaths in desert, arctic, or alpine conditions may simply dessicate and degrade rather than being eaten.
The entropic channel may pass through biological mechanism, but there's no obligation that it must.
Increased entropy mostly in the form of heat.
Most of those nutrients you, as a human being, either can't eat at all or get nothing from. Humans can't feed on hay and silage.
I have no idea why otherwise smart people get such a brain block on the topic of meat-eating. These "gotcha" points fall apart if you take 10 seconds to think about it.
Why? Anyway, wheat is a grass.
Much of Texas lacks water -- generally West Texas, a line extending from roughly Austin. In the US generally, the 100th parallel divides the moister east from the drier west. Topsoils are also far poorer than further east.
There was an experiment conducted some years ago on dryland farming. It ended poorly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time is an excellent telling of this:
https://books.google.com/books?id=np1RwDQfpjsC&pg=PP1#v=onep...
Not enough water.
One easy thought experiment that helped me understand: given how extremely poor our ancestors where and how hard they worked to make ends meet there must have been some advantage to keeping animals.
Otherwise they wouldn't have had them, because they are sometimes a real hassle and gathering food for them is time consuming I can tell you.
So maybe your idea would work in a more temperate climate. And maybe it would provide extra food for people further north, but it would mean a lot of land that cannot be used for anything but pastures would go out of use.
That's my experience anyway. I spend my summers in a friend's farm and they have a small army of chickens, a plattoon of goats and in different times, a couple of pigs or so. We get fresh eggs and fresh goat's milk, but all the meat we eat is bought from outside the farm. It seems to be a very good deal actually, which was surprising to me when I first realised it, because of course the chickens and goats have to be fed. Then again- they often eat what we do (or rather, our leftovers).
Our ancestors generally ate far less meat.
They could also feed smaller animals like poultry on scraps of food, which doesn't really scale to feeding the billions of animals we currently raise for food.
I don't argue that we should continue todays consumption, only that going all vegan might not be a good idea.
Reducing consumption seems like a really good idea to me for several reasons. As does small scale poultry and animal farming (raising a pig or some poultry on scraps instead of throwing it away should be a good idea today as well if one could get away with it.)
The obvious explanation is that people don't like the implication that their behaviour is unethical and look for clever outs. Rather than simply owning that benefits > costs from their point of view (a la 'I like bacon too much').
Of course questioning motivations is not a point to be made in an argument. However it is an entirely satisfactory Bayesian explanation of why so many people take the other side of the argument with such force.
I'm not saying this is not possible. But I am saying - as someone who has grown up on a farm and studied farming - that it might be somewhat more complicated.
For a start, not all farmland is usable for anything but grass.
Otherwise this objection is a case of 'an edge case exists, and I would like you to imagine that it is the major determining factor.'
Same goes for a number of other places in the world.
As I pointed out from the start, the efficiency gained by growing plant food for humans instead of food for animals elsewhere in the world might more than compensate for this, -but going hardcore vegan will reduce global food production compared to a mixed approach.
It will also erase a lot of culture and landscapes that depend on active animal farming, but who cares?
I'll spell out what a strong argument for the point you're trying to make might look like:
A) An estimate of the total number of calories coming from purely grazed meat on this sort of land.
B) An estimate of the total number of calories of meat consumed.
C) A/B > 3/4.
Without having to resort to any kind of estimates[0] I have demonstrated for anyone interested that a purely vegan alternative will render lots of land unproductive, so - even given an optimal use of the rest of the land - you will still leave unused resources on the table.
I can go deeper into this subject, but I think this will suffice for now.
And: I'm all for reducing consumption and waste, and actually enjoy the reduce-reuse-part of the reduce-reuse-recycle-idea so this shouldn't be seen as a defense for overconsumption, bad farming practices or anything but rather an attempt to bring some realism into this thread.
[0]:really my only given is that not all land is usable for effective production of anything except grass.
How much in comparison to farming generally?
You're attempting a bait and switch: 1) Claim veganism is bad because it would reduce output if everyone switched now. 2) Claim veganism is bad because it would reduce output at the margin of an optimal policy.
These two things are quite different scenarios. Scenario 2) is tacitly accepting that most people would be vegan most of the time. But hey, if you want to argue that under both our optimal policies there would be many more plant eaters, fine by me.
This has already been answered elsewhere in this discussion.
> You're attempting a bait and switch: 1) Claim veganism is bad because it would reduce output if everyone switched now. 2) Claim veganism is bad because it would reduce output at the margin of an optimal policy.
I'm not doing a bait and switch. Here is what I wrote:
1.) in a sibling thread before this one:
> So maybe your idea would work in a more temperate climate. And maybe it would provide extra food for people further north, but it would mean a lot of land that cannot be used for anything but pastures would go out of use.
2.) On top of this thread:
> I'm not saying this is not possible. But I am saying - as someone who has grown up on a farm and studied farming - that it might be somewhat more complicated.
I write that in reply to you writing a comment in support of this comment:
> Yeah, and the vast amounts of land used to grow those things can be redirected to other things that humans can eat.
> I have no idea why otherwise smart people get such a brain block on the topic of meat-eating. These "gotcha" points fall apart if you take 10 seconds to think about it.
Back to your claim of bait and switch :
It is more like as I proceed down the thread I get more and more specific to make my point easier to understand.
I still stand by my original claim.
My point is that while vast areas can be repurposed other vast areas cannot.
I point out early on that it might be possible anyway.
I also claim that like a lot of other topics it isn't something you can understand in ten seconds like the comment you supported seems to claim.
1. Vegan food production wherever possible. 2. Non-vegan food where vegan food is not possible (the Norwegian uplands case).
Is that correct? Or would you like to finesse things any more?
- feedlots,
- constant use of antibiotics,
- use of food grade grain for animal feed
- unhealthy overconsumption in small parts of the human population
- while others are starving
it sounds like an improvement.
If you ask what I want though I still think we could do even better than that.
There are a number of other parameters I think we should try to optimize for as well instead of thinking just vegan/not vegan:
- Regional and national or even local production to reduce fragile dependencies and reduce the need for transport.
- Healthier food.
- Happiness.
- Better conditions, both for workers and for the livestock.
- etc
Worldwide distribution changes things up a bit, but barring that entire cultures fit their habits according to the land they had, not vice versa.
Either way, the amount of land and water required to raise each lb of beef is an order of magnitude greater than the amount needed for a pound of chicken, which is in turn an order of magnitude higher than the resources needed for a pound of vegetables. The expanding demand for beef is ecologically unsustainable, doubly so if people are burning down critical environments to create cow pasture.
I guess the million dollar question is - who has the moral authority to tell Brazilians that they don't have the right to utilize their land and natural resources like China, USA, India, and every other industrial nation?
That is going to be a very thorny issue in the years to come, thorny enough to lead to armed conflict. Climate change is a threat to humanity, much less a huge threat to the national security interests of any nation with a military. At some point the situation is going to be serious enough that military conflict will occur over water rights, environmental destruction, climate refugees, etc.
I imagine that before that happens, some country (or countries) will get hit with sanctions for environmental destruction. Of course that will be fraught because who isn't guilty of that?
But at the end of the day, what does it matter when the future of civilization is at stake? Why should the world stand by while Brazil (or any other country) destroys THE essential ecosystem in combating climate change. 100 years from now if the Amazon is gone people will wish other countries had put a stop to the destruction with sanctions or even military force.
Is this really true though about evolution in general. Evolution happens because of adaptations due to selective pressures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that evolutionary changes are beneficial.
They may be a local optimum, or adaptations to circumstances which existed at one time, but no longer, or be the result of a long chain of path-dependencies (effectively: multiple local optima jumps, a/k/a "the adjacent possible"), or even non-heritable benefits, such as "don't be under that big sky rock when it comes down" (luck plays a selective role, but features little if any heritable characteristics).
All that said, I'm not making any argument for or against meat eating, other than to note that the evolutionary support of it suggests that it was certainly useful at least at some point in the past.
I think you're missing the point entirely. It's about the calories needed to feed the animal, and the 10:1 ratio is the usual number quoted for this.
This is just completely false. All meat consumed is bioavailable protein and nutrients. Even more so when it's cooked. Plants have reduced bioavailability due to high oxalate, phytic acid, and lectins.
Humans would have never evolved the ability to eat meat if it didn't confer a natural advantage over foragers.