10 ms·

It does so, but via an inefficient route (plant -> animal -> human instead of plant -> human), which causes huge sustainability and animal ethical issues.

_Microft 5y ago
Here is a useful link in case anyone wants to read up on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...
chr1 5y ago
You can't eat the plants that are eaten by the animals. Not all pastures can be converted to fields, and converting the rest will actually reduce biodiversity and cause more sustainability issues.
- _Microft 5y ago
  Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That means that you actually will not need to convert all these pastures to fields because they are just not needed anymore. Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore If you want to know more, type "land use" into the search box of https://ourworldindata.org https://ourworldindata.org and pick an article of your choice.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    This is incredibly misleading. I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature. Other than cows here and there, it's wildland. Coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and all sorts of wildlife abound. The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment. "Land use" measured in abstract square feet is not a useful concept.
    - _Microft 5y ago
      > The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment. You might be surprised but 40% of all (cereal) crops are produced to feed animals. That would almost completely go away except a bit to compensate for the loss of meat. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-uses?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...
      - cheese_goddess 5y ago
        So we'd be left with the other 60% and then we'd have to increase the production to make up for the decrase in production of meat. That's a very slim margin of improvement. The other thing we could do of course is to avoid feeding animals with crops like soy and corn, and instead let them browse freely and eat the wild grasses and shrubs that they would eat normally, if humans didn't feed them more "efficient" feeds. Obviously that would mean a significantly reduced number of farmed animals, but that's a feature, not a bug. Perhaps we can all agree on this: the true plague is industrial meat production.
    - radec 5y ago
      I would argue this is incredibly misleading. What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. So realistically we are talking about factory farmed animals. If we are talking about factory farmed animals then it goes back to the needing these nature destructing farms you are talking about just to feed animals that then feed humans, this is not an efficient system.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - cheese_goddess 5y ago
        > What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different breeds. They are certainly treated differently. So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where. Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil). > You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. "Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?tab=chart&time=latest&country=DEU~FRA~GBR~USA~ARG~BRA~CHN~ESP~ITA~TUR~JPN~KOR~BEL~NLD~CAN~CHL~GRC~POL~SWE~CHE~SAU~ZAF~BGD~IND~IDN~IRN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta... Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US, Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised countries in the chart.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    >> Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh. Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could. Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.
    - _Microft 5y ago
      Yes, it is true that we cannot eat all the plants that animals can but it is only "technically true" in the sense that it does not not really matter.
indymike 5y ago
Finding high protein / low carbohydrate plants to eat is hard. Many meatless meat products are hyper-processed. Last I looked a huge part of the population is diabetic. They can't eat grains, can eat small servings of nuts, fruits are mostly out, and greens alone aren't sustainable nutrition.
- irtigor 5y ago
  My charitable interpretation is that when someone says "eat plants", they don't really mean "only eat plants" but "don't eat animal products, eat plants + enriched foods + injections/pills/tablet", because we are omnivores and we need some nutrients that are incredibly hard to get naturally from plants, like vitamin b12, so in order to stay healthy, without eating animal products, there's only the enriched foods and/or pills/injections/tablets route.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    So, "don't eat meat, eat supplements"? How does that make any sense?
    - irtigor 5y ago
      You don't need to necessarily eat meat (a glass of milk has half the recommended daily intake of vitamin b12), but if you are not willing to eat any animal product, the only viable alternative is something like fortified plant based beverages or over-the-counter supplements, so that's my take, otherwise they would be suggesting a really poor diet for humans.
      - indymike 5y ago
        Milk is high in carbohydrate. So are most plant based beverages. Back to diabetics... Can't or should not eat it (or should have tiny, tiny portions which reduce the amount of nutrition anyway). Problem is for people who should not consume carbohydrate, especially sugars, a plant-based diet is not sustainable. Yes supplements can supply nutrition, but they are the epitome of highly processed products.
darksaints 5y ago
That's a facile understanding of efficiency. For example, many animals that we eat are dramatically more efficient at absorbing or consuming certain nutrients from plants than we are: Iron, Calcium, Zinc, B12, EPA, DHA. If adding a step in a supply chain always introduced more net inefficiency, we would never own things like cars or televisions. The complexity you introduce by shortening the supply chain makes a whole host of things completely infeasible. There are plenty of food sources that could work well for humans without an animal in the intermediate supply chain. But humans aren't about to start consuming their bodyweight in switchgrass or zooplankton just to get a handful of nutrients that only animal sources can easily provide us.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  You can live a completely healthy and nutritionally complete plant based life style though, and without consuming your body weight in anything. So if we don’t _need_ the animals to die for us, killing them is immoral. It’s immoral because it’s unnecessary.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    "Completely healthy and nutritionally complete" debatable. Vegan diets are discouraged significantly for pregnant women and children because of how damaging calcium, zinc, and B12 deficiencies can be during that time. And even if you aren't a pregnant woman or child, you still have to deal with the various deficiencies that come with that, typically by eating very targeted foods or highly processed and manufactured supplements that also have problems, such as availability, allergies, cost, or simple difficulty incorporating into diets (e.g. you can't exactly use algae oil like you would olive oil, you can't sprinkle flaxseed on everything). And speak for yourself with regards to morality. Humans evolved as omnivorous creatures, just like millions of other species. I feel no moral obligation to eliminate animal food sources from my diet. The opposite, in fact. Because a vegan diet is effectively an abandonment of culture. I'm not going to stop making Pasteis De Nata or Caldo Verde simply because you feel bad for the animals. Letting my culture wither away like that is a far bigger sin in my eyes than eating animal-derived foods, which we evolved to do.

_Microft 5y ago

Here is a useful link in case anyone wants to read up on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...

chr1 5y ago

You can't eat the plants that are eaten by the animals. Not all pastures can be converted to fields, and converting the rest will actually reduce biodiversity and cause more sustainability issues.

_Microft 5y ago
Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That means that you actually will not need to convert all these pastures to fields because they are just not needed anymore. Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore If you want to know more, type "land use" into the search box of https://ourworldindata.org https://ourworldindata.org and pick an article of your choice.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  This is incredibly misleading. I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature. Other than cows here and there, it's wildland. Coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and all sorts of wildlife abound. The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment. "Land use" measured in abstract square feet is not a useful concept.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    > The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment. You might be surprised but 40% of all (cereal) crops are produced to feed animals. That would almost completely go away except a bit to compensate for the loss of meat. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-uses?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...
    - cheese_goddess 5y ago
      So we'd be left with the other 60% and then we'd have to increase the production to make up for the decrase in production of meat. That's a very slim margin of improvement. The other thing we could do of course is to avoid feeding animals with crops like soy and corn, and instead let them browse freely and eat the wild grasses and shrubs that they would eat normally, if humans didn't feed them more "efficient" feeds. Obviously that would mean a significantly reduced number of farmed animals, but that's a feature, not a bug. Perhaps we can all agree on this: the true plague is industrial meat production.
  - radec 5y ago
    I would argue this is incredibly misleading. What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. So realistically we are talking about factory farmed animals. If we are talking about factory farmed animals then it goes back to the needing these nature destructing farms you are talking about just to feed animals that then feed humans, this is not an efficient system.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - cheese_goddess 5y ago
      > What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different breeds. They are certainly treated differently. So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where. Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil). > You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. "Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?tab=chart&time=latest&country=DEU~FRA~GBR~USA~ARG~BRA~CHN~ESP~ITA~TUR~JPN~KOR~BEL~NLD~CAN~CHL~GRC~POL~SWE~CHE~SAU~ZAF~BGD~IND~IDN~IRN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta... Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US, Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised countries in the chart.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  >> Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh. Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could. Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    Yes, it is true that we cannot eat all the plants that animals can but it is only "technically true" in the sense that it does not not really matter.

indymike 5y ago

Finding high protein / low carbohydrate plants to eat is hard. Many meatless meat products are hyper-processed. Last I looked a huge part of the population is diabetic. They can't eat grains, can eat small servings of nuts, fruits are mostly out, and greens alone aren't sustainable nutrition.

irtigor 5y ago
My charitable interpretation is that when someone says "eat plants", they don't really mean "only eat plants" but "don't eat animal products, eat plants + enriched foods + injections/pills/tablet", because we are omnivores and we need some nutrients that are incredibly hard to get naturally from plants, like vitamin b12, so in order to stay healthy, without eating animal products, there's only the enriched foods and/or pills/injections/tablets route.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  So, "don't eat meat, eat supplements"? How does that make any sense?
  - irtigor 5y ago
    You don't need to necessarily eat meat (a glass of milk has half the recommended daily intake of vitamin b12), but if you are not willing to eat any animal product, the only viable alternative is something like fortified plant based beverages or over-the-counter supplements, so that's my take, otherwise they would be suggesting a really poor diet for humans.
    - indymike 5y ago
      Milk is high in carbohydrate. So are most plant based beverages. Back to diabetics... Can't or should not eat it (or should have tiny, tiny portions which reduce the amount of nutrition anyway). Problem is for people who should not consume carbohydrate, especially sugars, a plant-based diet is not sustainable. Yes supplements can supply nutrition, but they are the epitome of highly processed products.

darksaints 5y ago

That's a facile understanding of efficiency. For example, many animals that we eat are dramatically more efficient at absorbing or consuming certain nutrients from plants than we are: Iron, Calcium, Zinc, B12, EPA, DHA. If adding a step in a supply chain always introduced more net inefficiency, we would never own things like cars or televisions. The complexity you introduce by shortening the supply chain makes a whole host of things completely infeasible. There are plenty of food sources that could work well for humans without an animal in the intermediate supply chain. But humans aren't about to start consuming their bodyweight in switchgrass or zooplankton just to get a handful of nutrients that only animal sources can easily provide us.

sweetheart 5y ago
You can live a completely healthy and nutritionally complete plant based life style though, and without consuming your body weight in anything. So if we don’t _need_ the animals to die for us, killing them is immoral. It’s immoral because it’s unnecessary.
- darksaints 5y ago
  "Completely healthy and nutritionally complete" debatable. Vegan diets are discouraged significantly for pregnant women and children because of how damaging calcium, zinc, and B12 deficiencies can be during that time. And even if you aren't a pregnant woman or child, you still have to deal with the various deficiencies that come with that, typically by eating very targeted foods or highly processed and manufactured supplements that also have problems, such as availability, allergies, cost, or simple difficulty incorporating into diets (e.g. you can't exactly use algae oil like you would olive oil, you can't sprinkle flaxseed on everything). And speak for yourself with regards to morality. Humans evolved as omnivorous creatures, just like millions of other species. I feel no moral obligation to eliminate animal food sources from my diet. The opposite, in fact. Because a vegan diet is effectively an abandonment of culture. I'm not going to stop making Pasteis De Nata or Caldo Verde simply because you feel bad for the animals. Letting my culture wither away like that is a far bigger sin in my eyes than eating animal-derived foods, which we evolved to do.