Massive amounts of grain are fed to livestock, and vast acreage is cleared for grazing livestock. If everyone went vegetarian, I'm fairly certain the amount of crops grown and land we use for agriculture would be significantly less. Turning grain into meat is highly inefficient.

I see you missed my point about grass fed.

Why does everyone have to become vegetarian?

When everyone stops eating meat and turns to "healthy" meals like corn based vegetarian burgers I think we are all worse off.

Variety, locally grown produce, locally raised animals is the best way to keep diversity and quality. The vegetarian food available now is good because it's not as mass produced.

The point of ethical vegetarianism is not keeping diversity and quality of foods, it's preventing bad life of animals.

It's also not the point of ecological vegetarianism: it's preserving the diversity of natural ecosystems, as opposed to food farms.

Grass fed cattle and sheep have a pretty good life. What you are arguing against is intensive feedlots.

There's a third aspect to that. Or maybe it's another ecology problem.

While I don't have the numbers, I strongly suspect there's not enough grass to feed all the humans the amount of meat they would like to eat right now. At least based on observing the prices of intensive vs grass fed, or watching the numbers for intensive production alone.

So if we want grass fed as the new normal, we're either going to have to intensify it back again, or we'll end up eating respectively less meat. That's near-vegetarianism or bust.

Yes this is true - there is not enough grasslands to feed the current demand for meat - actually there is not enough feedlots to feed the demand for meat on a global scale. Many poor people around the world would eat more meat if it was cheaper.

The solutions to let the market solve the problem - if there was only grass fed meat available the cost would be very high and meat would become a luxury again.

What do you think happens to all the animals no longer used as a food source in a capitalistic society?

Assuming this is an honest question and not a lame attempt at a gotcha: as more people switch to a vegan diet we will gradually stop breeding them in the first place, so there are no animals for something to "happen to."

Sort of both: OOH, mankind once again causes mass extinction for a few dozen species. OTOH, the oceans will be teeming with life.

The gotcha is mainly that one can support the welfare of animals but also be ok with their systematic extinction. I don't know which outcome is worse.

I like meat too and won’t give it up unless decent lab grown meat comes around but this comment is the most dissembling nonsense I have heard in a while.

It is no more nonsense that the OP’s argument. If you do an analysis on animals killed per calorie, grains kill many more animals than say grass fed cattle. I think many people are unaware how many rodents are killed every year growing and harvesting grains.

I don’t think this is a very good reason to eat or not eat meat.

Citation?

This PDF is a flyer on pest control, presumably targeted at growers of grain. Nowhere does it contain anything resembling the "analysis on animals killed per calorie" you referred to.

You're allowed to just say you like eating meat mate, haha

I certainly do like eating meat and I don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat. The problem with trying to use ethics to justify a position is there is little agreement on what is ethical or not.

Some people are not comfortable killing an animal to eat it. To them it's not an ethical choice. I have no problem killing an animal for food. I also have no problem with someone else finding it unethical.

Each person has their own beliefs that govern their ethics. As long as we all find a way to live peacefully together there is nothing wrong with that.

I am in 100% agreement with this sentiment, what I am not in agreement with is that vegetarians are somehow more ethical than meat eaters.

Cattle eat more plant calories than the resultant meat. All those plant calories include the “vegetarian suffering.” Purely grass fed meats with no farming will be too inefficient to provide meat to everyone.

Sure meat might become more of a luxury than it is now, but in a calorie to calorie trade off grains have a higher animal kill rate than grass fed meat. I don’t many people are aware how many rodents are killed harvesting and storing grain.

> On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed.

Would that not lead to a desire to create as many "lives" as possible? I don't think I've met many people optimising for that, although I won't rule it out.

I would not be surprised if there was some religion out there that espoused such a doctrine, likely one that believed in reincarnation.

This is a new and surprising take.

This incredibly stupid take is actually pretty common on HN whenever vegetarianism comes up. I don't know whether they're simply mocking the serious thought many people have put into the ethics of eating animals or what, but it's manifestly false and patently ridiculous to claim that eating plants kills more animals than eating animals.

Some people have a hard time engaging with ideas that might cast them in a negative, ethical light. I’ve had people abruptly stop me from explaining ethical vegetarianism, even though they initiated the conversation haha

On a side note, I never followed the project very closely but I was really hopeful for soylent. What happened? Is the technology just not there? Do we not know enough about human physiology? What is missing to take the soylent idea — which I understood as automate most (boring) meals — and make it a reality?

I saw a quora answer which says we simply don’t know enough about the science behind food but to me it implies that maybe some day our knowledge will get there?

People laugh but the idea of “bachelor chow” from futurama makes sense to me.

I don’t know enough about the topic of ethical vegetarianism to criticize it. I eat meat. In fact, I had fish for dinner last night. I just don’t think about the ethics of it.

Now I may sound hypocritical when I say this because I’m against policy action through taxation (make taxes as simple as possible by eliminating all income tax credits and deductions). However, I know I’ll continue to eat meat (including milk, eggs, chicken, pork) unless it is either too impractical or too expensive.

I want to believe that if push comes to shove I’ll be able to adjust my eating habits and that my current eating habits are not a part of my identity.

I don’t really have a point to make here except that something like soylent would go a long way toward making me vegetarian at least for the meals I eat alone.

I really liked it as an occasional meal replacement, for much of the reasons above. But then they switched from rice to soy or pea protein. I have a peanut allergy. While I can eat soy/peas by themselves, the hydrolyzed proteins give me hives. Otherwise I'd still be eating it.

The taste/quality/mouthfeel definitely went up since v1.

The soylent thing always struck me as a bizarre Silicon Valley fad with very limited appeal. I haven’t done a study but I would be very confident that most people simply enjoy eating food.

I’m actually in the middle of a bad GI flare-up, and soylent is a god send. I forget to eat, solid foods are hard to digest, I oversleep and miss meal times, etc. A bottled soylent helps me get back on track quickly.

Some people don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat and rather than get into an argument with a vegetarian prefer to end the conversation. I am not one of these people.

Do you know how many animals die growing grains and other vegetables? Or do you consider the the life of a rodent ethically less than that of a cow?

Take that number and at minimum ADD the cows to it. It's not like they feed of thin air while they live.

In addition to that, every step up the food chain requires 10x the amount of energy so for every kg of beef produced you need equivalent of 10kg plants just to raise the cows. It's not like the cows feed freely in the grass and carefully avoid stomping on insects all the time, this is often also harvested with machines killing rodents exactly the same way, just multiplied by 10x.

Meat eater myself here, occasionally and in moderation, but at least i'm not making up nonsense about rodents to feel better for myself.

Edit: To add some data into the discussion, see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2vx78/the... for example. It shows more than 10x land usage for cattle and even more for water and energy, sources and their bias discussed in the comments over there. There is also some interesting links stating that purely grass fed beef can only provide half the cattle on same unit of land.

Yes grass fed cattle are less efficient than feedlot cattle, but this is not an ethical issue, but an economic one.

Not many insects are killed by cattle stomping on them out on some grassland compared to how many are killed by insecticides sprayed on crop land.