Your phrase "each layer of indirection" made the following analogy pop into my head: eating meat is like using an electron app running in a VM. I suppose "bare metal" would be if we could ourselves photosynthesize, alas.

Being pedantic. If we eat the stuff they feed to the cows I eat we would die. Grass is not human digestible.

My point being the problem is not meat which is a natural part of our diet (and is traditionally raised on land not well suited to crops) but the crazy frankenmeat many are reduced to eating due to overpopulation.

And as you well know, no one is suggesting that, so why is it worth to mention?

Pretty sure the parent comment was suggesting that. Hé even said “it’s what vegetarians do”.

Cows raised for beef are almost always fed corn and soy in feedlots, not let out to pasture to graze on grass.

Indeed, it’s a shame since grass-fed tastes much better and is more environmentally friendly.

Either way, we can’t just “eat what the cows eat” directly and there are a lot more variables to consider.

All meats are causing much more greenhouse gas emissions than vegetarian food. Even cows only eating grass farts a lot, which is a significant contribution (not kidding).

> a natural part of our diet

What has been natural about our diets since the invention of cooking?

What unit of energy? Calories?

They are talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...

My BS-O-metre just went off big time. First off, this is an extreme generalization that does not pick up local differences. Take the Northeren hemisphere for instance, where meat is in many instances the most effective way to utilize our growing conditions to produce edible food. [1] It's just not possible to efficibely use our climate to make sustainable production of vegetables, so meat is in fact a better way to make the most of our growing conditions.

The alternative would be to let tons of cultured pastures go to waste, and instead develop extremely expensive and wasteful greenhouse altnernatives that would suck our energy reserves dry. That is why meat production is in fact preferrable in the North. It's just not feasible to produce enough food without spending a lot of resources on imports, due to growing conditions that favour greens that aren't edible for humans, so our best option is then meat for local and "short-travelled" sustenance. [2]

Second, there's obviously a place for meat eaters in this biodiversity. Of course, we're "too many" humans (who are of course meat eaters), but on the other hand we're sustaining our current population nicely with progresses made within both environmentally friendly transportation and not to mention advances within industrialized and automated farming. [3] Add to this that the population growth is in fact slowing down. [4]

Long story short, the world has a giant surplus of food. [5] The amount of food here isn't the problem. It's the adverse effects local politics, production and transportation that are the problems the grand level, and to that end you can't as a general rule suggest that veggies are the "best" option. Well, it clearly isn't in the northeren hemisphere.

In the end the moral question is, should we really force people to eat this, that or the other? I mean, there's obviously no harm in making suggestions, but when those suggestions aren't met with enthusiasm, then change isn't liable to happen without the use of force. And I think can all agree that we are nowhere near a Soylent Green situation, so we still have the option to give people a choice.

Personally, my bet are on those developing succulent and protein-rich meat alternatives. The second they can make a product that similar enough, but without the environmental overhead, then people will flock to it.

[1]: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3437e.pdf

[2]: Norwegian language source: https://www.agrianalyse.no/getfile.php/134664-1553523670/Dok...

[3]: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow....

[5]: https://www.dw.com/en/the-global-food-surplus/a-15452289

If you are interested in this, you might want to read the well-researched article of OurWorldInData on food production and its impact. Some things like producing meat locally are, maybe surprisingly, worse solutions than replacing it with vegetables even when these were shipped around the globe.

Transport has a low impact on the total emissions (and also producing beef is sooo bad) that you could e.g. ship a kilogram of peas several times around the globe and the peas would still win emission-wise against a kilogram of locally produced beef. If you pick another metric, like energy content ('calories') or compare emissions per mass of contained protein, beef is still worse.

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Don't you think it's a little unfair to compare peas to meat? First of all, most people aren't going to replace their meat with veggies, and most veggies already have to be imported anyway. Compared to importing other meats, it is of course much better to have the meat produced locally, especially considering that the land can't really be utilized well in other ways. Which is also a question of avoiding dependencies, btw. In any case, beef is just a part of what is produced, as mountaneous areas are for instance better suited to mutton. Then there's the question of sorely lacking amino acids in pea proteins, meaning that it's not really fair to make one-to-one comparisons. Even if there are benefits from replacing all meats with veggies, the taste and texture just can't compare to meat, which again means that very few are going to voluntarily make the switch even for conscientious reasons.

Not at all, the topic of ressource efficiency in the form of the trophic level of different foods was exactly how our sub-thread of the discussion started. I have not argued about any other aspect of meat other than it being a pretty awful way of extracting ressources.

What a coincidence: Max Roser, the founder of Our World in Data, shared an article [0][1] on Twitter about the importance of the choice of diet and local production a mere two hours after my earlier posting.

[0] https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1294928556036956162

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

As it's a fairly long report, do you mind pointing out where in [1] your first claim is demonstrated?

...why is the unit important?

It's a percentage, so why would the units matter?