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This is why I said it may take a while to catch on. Morality and norms are dynamic things. Raising animals for the sole purpose of butchering them is an incredi
by subungual 6y ago
This is why I said it may take a while to catch on. Morality and norms are dynamic things. Raising animals for the sole purpose of butchering them is an incredibly inefficient way to feed people. Once we move beyond it, I have little doubt peoples' feelings about the practice will change quickly, as they have with other historically brutal practices.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y agoHow can you say that it's inefficient? The reason we do this today is precisely because of how efficient it is. Cows eat grass, turn into huge balloons of meat, and feed lots of people. They take almost no maintenance. I can't think of a more efficient way to feed people.
- subungual 6y agoRoughly 1% of the cattle produced in the US are grass fed (source below). The rest are fed in feed lots and receive primarily a diet of corn and soy. The rule of thumb is that for each step you go up the food chain, an order of magnitude of biomass efficiency is lost-- that is, you have to give an animal 10 calories of feed to produce 1 calorie of meat. In beef, the caloric and protein efficiency metrics are 3%, meaning that you're feeding the cow 33x as many calories and grams of protein as you're getting out of it (source below). This is incredibly inefficient and is one of many reasons that a meat-based diet is not sustainable for a growing population and particularly a growing (global) middle class. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401#:~:text=Currently%2C%20'grass%2Dfinished',current%20US%20supply%20%5B12%5D https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401#.... https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...