I'm working in this space for a tiny company that delivers high quality, low antibiotic use, low environmental impact, pasture raised single-source meat products in California. We're going to run farm education "meet the rancher" events to get people out to where the meat is actually produced, but we have to be realistic: that's more for the instagram photo ops to convince people that we're legitimate instead of to truly change consumer behavior.
The ugly truth is Americans eat too much meat, and we expect it to be dirt cheap. Meat has been heavily subsidized, and all the externalities from industrial meat production have been ignored, for the past 60 years at least. Turning back the clock on those consumer expectations is going to be very painful.
I'm also extremely worried about the rise of industrial meat production in the developing world, but it seems elitist of wealthy Americans to complain about Chinese agriculture standards when we can't even fix it in our own backyard.
>Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.
Not just meat farms! One thing vegans and vegetarians often gloss over is the death per calorie involved in crop fields. Those thousands of acres have animals in them, and the machines sure dont stop for every varmit that gets in the way.
It is not clear what the right answer is (assuming all you care about is number of animal lives, which is an inadequate measure anyway). The best advice i know of is to only eat well raised cow meat because 1 cow provides a lot of calories, and vegetables, chickens, and pigs etc do not and kill lots of animals.
It takes significantly more feed to raise a cow. The calories extracted from cow meat is extremely inefficient considering the high number of calories in (feed) and water. So, you could not use feed (vegetable death-per-calorie!) because it's something like a 8:1 calorie ratio for feed to a pound of beef. You'd have to pasture raise the cows.
There is no feasible way to ensure that all food is pasture-grazing cow meat at a price point accessible to most Americans.
There is currently no cruelty free-way to have cheap, accessible calories. If you really wanted the lowest death-per-calorie, one of the most feasible approaches would be consuming large amounts of rice.
I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.
Maybe Americans (westerners in general actually) should simply eat less? 3 oz of meat per day is enough (5 oz of protein is recommended, but part of that can easily be filled by grains, legumes, cheese, milk, etc...). No one needs 10 oz of meat per day (current average consumption for Americans).
I think this is a part of the problem in dominantly meat-eating cultures: they don't realize how diverse and nutritious plant life is. Treating meat and perhaps milk/eggs as real food and the rest as mostly fillers and in-betweens (I know I did).
Even without meat/milk/eggs/animal products, rice and beans, even barring all legumes and cereal grains, probably even barring all grains (e.g. amaranth, buckwheat, chia, quinoa, also sunflower, poppy, hemp..) there would still be enough plants life to have a diverse diet and probably even fully nutritiously sufficient diet without artificial supplements (a couple of micronutrients can be tricky, e.g. B₁₂).
Many, perhaps even most of the remaining diverse crops are currently notably more work to grow, but they should still have significantly less ecological impact than eating excessive amounts of meat.
Ruminant holon systems like those used by Polyface Farms (Joel Salatin of Omnivore Dilemma fame) are incredibly efficient at both producing calories and utilizing waste products.
Hmm? I am enjoying the wide variety of legumes, for one. :D I make stews out of them. :)
They didn't taste like shrimp though. They also have a lot of chitin.
Eating meat will always have a higher death per calorie. An informed vegan knows that there is no such thing as a cruelty-free diet, only one that minimizes it.