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>Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? It absolutely should. https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-w

>Isn't that a fancy way of saying "eating meat should be a privilege for the wealthy"? It absolutely should. https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought-being-worsened-livestock-industry https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought... - 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's - 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will take centuries (or longer) of rainfall to replenish. You get water contamination, you get monoculture crop for vast swaths of land that negatively impact wild pollinators and soil health, etc etc. I love meat, but it absolutely HAS to be a luxury. My fiance's parents and siblings mostly own livestock. For personal use for a few dozen of them they have a couple hundred acres which does not sustain their animals and requires considerable amounts of purchased feed for a dozenish cows, a couple dozen sheep/rams, a few dozen chickens etc in the heart of Missiouri. Depending on where you are in the world you need 2-25 acres of arable land per cow during the warm seasons to feed themselves. The average grass fed cow will yield about 530lbs of meat at slaughter after 2 years of life. That's 4-50 acres tied up for 2 years to produce 530lbs of meat, less than 3/4 of meat per day. If you switch them to grain you need about 25 pounds per day of dry feed. In the corn belt you can get about 200 bushels per acre. A bushel is about 56 pounds. That gives you 1.13 years for a cow with optimal yield per acre of corn, outside of the corn belt you'll only get about 100 bushels per acre yielding you about 0.61 of a cow's annual requirement per acre. Never mind that cow's digestive systems aren't really designed for corn. There's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world... 20ish gallons of water a day, 25 pounds of dry feed a day... Meat is a luxury man. A luxury.

luckylion 7y ago
> Meat is a luxury man. A luxury. Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need". I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Processed insect protein might actually be a nice way to replace most of the meat ? (Tried some dried insects recently, taste like meat dust.) Anyway, this "fuck the average people, they shouldn't [do X] while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income" goes for anything really... Ideally, public shaming should be enough - though it often isn't. (At least Al Gore political career didn't work out !)
- baq 7y ago
  decouple food from income, problem solved.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Let's pretend you make a magical cow that you can get from birth to slaughter in 1 year and has a normal food intake and normal average slaughter weight and magically grinds up into a uniform 70% lean meat / 30% fat. 9,125 pounds of dry feed and 7,300 of drinking water nets you 530lbs of meat. We're going to stick with corn since it is a better cow-day yield per acre than oats. - 9,125lbs of corn = more than 16 million kcals. - 530lbs of 70/30 beef = 798,180 kcals. That's 20x more calories if you fed the corn to humans than if you process it through a cow's stomach with a magic cow that doesn't exist. In reality it's more 30-40x. A single cow's annual intake can feed more than 20 humans a 2000 kcal diet for a year. If we switched the farmland feeding cows alone over to growing for humans, you could feed 30 billion people if you stick with corn. Obviously humans can't surive on corn alone, realistically though you could feed 10-20 billion people with that same farmland, use less water, have far less environmental pollution, have less methane emissions, need far less refrigeration, drastically reduce the amount of antibiotics being used, improve soil quality, increase local pollinator populations by not turning square mile after square mile after square mile into the same crop, etc. The water cattle drink is something like 16.58 million Olympic swimming pools annually, or 41.45 cubic kilometers of water. Meat really is a luxury and needs to be treated as such. > I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income". I made no such claim. I removed animal products from 95% of my meals last year. It isn't sustainable and it's creating all sorts of issues for the environment (and people). Find and run the numbers yourself. Meat has to become a luxury.
boring_twenties 7y ago
> - 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's Is the soil in Nevada, Montana or Utah particularly suitable for growing anything other than hay?
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  The soil is good but there isn't enough fresh water in most valleys, and the aquifers are heavily fragmented with poor interconnectivity so you can't treat them as one big aquifer. Consequently, there is often local water that isn't connected to any other watershed i.e. if it wasn't used for local agriculture it could not be used at all because it doesn't go anywhere. The high desert is a good environment for growing many types of high-quality forage, both natural and farmed, so that tends to be what the land is used for. Cattle are raised on natural forage in the summer months and farmed forage in the winter months. Agriculture is highly adapted to the economics and resources of the local environment. For example, there are parts of the high desert that specialize in onion production, of all things. It makes sense in context.

luckylion 7y ago

> Meat is a luxury man. A luxury. Next up "plants are a luxury, the poor can eat processed insect protein, it's fine and contains all the nutrition they need". I don't have a problem with "let's eat less meat", I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income".

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Processed insect protein might actually be a nice way to replace most of the meat ? (Tried some dried insects recently, taste like meat dust.) Anyway, this "fuck the average people, they shouldn't [do X] while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income" goes for anything really... Ideally, public shaming should be enough - though it often isn't. (At least Al Gore political career didn't work out !)
baq 7y ago
decouple food from income, problem solved.
ryanmercer 7y ago
Let's pretend you make a magical cow that you can get from birth to slaughter in 1 year and has a normal food intake and normal average slaughter weight and magically grinds up into a uniform 70% lean meat / 30% fat. 9,125 pounds of dry feed and 7,300 of drinking water nets you 530lbs of meat. We're going to stick with corn since it is a better cow-day yield per acre than oats. - 9,125lbs of corn = more than 16 million kcals. - 530lbs of 70/30 beef = 798,180 kcals. That's 20x more calories if you fed the corn to humans than if you process it through a cow's stomach with a magic cow that doesn't exist. In reality it's more 30-40x. A single cow's annual intake can feed more than 20 humans a 2000 kcal diet for a year. If we switched the farmland feeding cows alone over to growing for humans, you could feed 30 billion people if you stick with corn. Obviously humans can't surive on corn alone, realistically though you could feed 10-20 billion people with that same farmland, use less water, have far less environmental pollution, have less methane emissions, need far less refrigeration, drastically reduce the amount of antibiotics being used, improve soil quality, increase local pollinator populations by not turning square mile after square mile after square mile into the same crop, etc. The water cattle drink is something like 16.58 million Olympic swimming pools annually, or 41.45 cubic kilometers of water. Meat really is a luxury and needs to be treated as such. > I just don't like the thinly veiled "fuck the average people, they shouldn't eat meat while I and my buddies will continue to do so thanks to our lavish income". I made no such claim. I removed animal products from 95% of my meals last year. It isn't sustainable and it's creating all sorts of issues for the environment (and people). Find and run the numbers yourself. Meat has to become a luxury.

boring_twenties 7y ago

> - 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's Is the soil in Nevada, Montana or Utah particularly suitable for growing anything other than hay?

jandrewrogers 7y ago
The soil is good but there isn't enough fresh water in most valleys, and the aquifers are heavily fragmented with poor interconnectivity so you can't treat them as one big aquifer. Consequently, there is often local water that isn't connected to any other watershed i.e. if it wasn't used for local agriculture it could not be used at all because it doesn't go anywhere. The high desert is a good environment for growing many types of high-quality forage, both natural and farmed, so that tends to be what the land is used for. Cattle are raised on natural forage in the summer months and farmed forage in the winter months. Agriculture is highly adapted to the economics and resources of the local environment. For example, there are parts of the high desert that specialize in onion production, of all things. It makes sense in context.