That's a common and unimpressive argument around plant based diets. Short of suicide, is it a choice that causes the least possible harm? Surely it causes less suffering that farming all of those plants anyway, feeding them to other animals that take up more land and cause more pollution, and then killing those animals and eating them?

> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

— The Vegan Society, Definition of veganism

Emphasis mine.

Animals eat farmed plants, and the amount of death/suffering required to produce the caloric equivalent is several orders of magnitude higher.

That is certainly true, but livestock is often eating row crops. A significant chunk of soybean meal and corn goes to feed livestock [1] [2]. If those row crops were consumed directly by humans instead, it would require a lot less land. [3]

[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go [2] https://www.iowacorn.org/corn-uses/ [3] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

You need more than just raw calories, though. How much plant food would it take to match this in terms of protein and B-vitamins?

https://imgur.com/a/8zzvcrq

So that's just 1 pound of beef.

You could get about 500 pounds of that raising a cow for a couple of years and slaughtering it.

What inputs would you need? Not too much, if you have grass, which a lot of the earth does. Let the cow graze, find it water. Optionally fatten it up at the end w/ some grain -- probably a better use than making ethanol out of it, at least.

We used to have millions of wild buffalo roaming North America. They were a dietary stable for many Native American tribes.

Were they really living in a less sustainable way than modern vegans picking up Impossible Burgers from Whole Foods?

So why add the destruction and suffering caused by animal agriculture on top of that?

We also dramatically increase the amount of plants we need to grow by feeding so much grass and grain to live stock. We can reduce the footprint of eating plants and hurting animals by not farming livestock for meat at all. It would be a net win, even with the incidental damage done by farming vegetables/grains/etc.