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Well, we can feed ourselves a lot better rapidly by: - Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usd

• slickrick216 4y ago
  If we just rate things better by calories we will enter a negative feedback loop where something is always better until we are all eating some synthetic sludge. Not saying you don’t have a point but we should aim to have our cake and eat it or else the future will just be worse and leave people with nothing to hope for.
  • yesenadam 4y ago
    Vegetarian diet somehow equals synthetic sludge and nothing to hope for?! Sorry if that mischaracterizes your point, but it does seem that's the slippery slope you were going for.
    • incone123 4y ago
      I regularly hear people saying the earth could support x billion people if we all just adopted diet y. Is it really our ambition to turn the whole world into residential skyscrapers just because we figured out how to feed 40 billion people on this one planet?
      • deleted 4y ago
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• ianhawes 4y ago
  It will be hard to give up my fertilizer-fed beef.
  • citizenkeen 4y ago
    (1) [Thing] is bad for the world (2) But I want it. This is the recipe for the road we are on.
    • Asooka 4y ago
      If eating meat were bad for the environment, all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct. We can have a discussion about how much meat per year production is sustainable, but I'm not going to start eating bugs.
      • deltille 4y ago
        Most predators that eat exclusively large prey don't number in the billions. Any reason you are averse to eating bugs specifically?
        • IntrepidWorm 4y ago
          I second this - cow based protein and cricket based protein both supply adequate value in an average human diet - why is there such a stigma against one versus the other?
          • incone123 4y ago
            I ordered a cricket steak and was a little disappointed. But seriously its not stigma, its cuisine preference.
            • IntrepidWorm 4y ago
              Mmm.... .0003 oz cutlets.
• DiabloD3 4y ago
  Please stop repeating the falsehood that animal pastures can somehow be transmuted into high yield crops for the human food supply: about 1/3rd of farmland in the US can never be transformed into suitable farmland for that task, and this accounts for most of the land used for pasture. If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now, imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform unsuitable land into still unsuitable land (but now growing human-edible crops) because somebody thought this was a good idea.
  • jhgb 4y ago
    I was under the impression that a significant percentage of cattle was not fed purely from pastures. Perhaps this what GP's comment was about?
    • Aromasin 4y ago
      Correct. The vast majority of US cattle are grain fed/finished. "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated. With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment." "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated. With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment." https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m... To add to that, the argument that animal pastures cannot be used for anything else has been proven demonstrably false time and time again. They are not usable for modern day agricultural monoculture cropland, which is the metric that the studies use and I'm sure the commenter is referring to. That does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that they cannot be rewilded or even transformed into usable farm land again through long term soil regeneration methods such as permaculture farming or effective through growing climate appropriate polycultures.
• Tade0 4y ago
  Thank you for the link - I needed a good source for my internet arguments over sustainability. Looking at the data it appears that we just need to drop beef and veal - totally doable I guess? I didn't read the source in full, but I wonder how would such a shift affect fish populations?
• thriftwy 4y ago
  Animal based protein does not need fertilizer to be grown and it may not be carbon-intensive. Plant based protein is basically putting oil in the ground and getting crops back. It's intellectually disgusting how you try to put a round peg in a square hole.
  • Saanti 4y ago
    What about fertilizer needed to produce food for livestock?
  • thinkcontext 4y ago
    45% of US corn is used for animal feed, which uses an enormous amount of nitrogen fertilizer. On the other hand, soy is able to fix its own nitrogen thus requiring less fertilizer than corn. Reality is the opposite of what you said.
  • myshpa 4y ago
    Meat and dairy needs not only a lot of land and fertilizers, but also a lot of pesticides/herbicides. Pesticide bioaccumulation in cattle https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7525218/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7525218/ Public Health Implications of Pesticide Residues in Meat https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50434365_Public_Health_Implications_of_Pesticide_Residues_in_Meat https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50434365_Public_Hea...
  • lm28469 4y ago
    Do you think animal based proteins are synthesised out of thin air ?
    • thriftwy 4y ago
      Normally it comes out of grass. But the public here seem to assume the only option is to put animals in a building and feed them corn. In this case, you might as well stop eating animal protein, if you can't make it work for you.
      • 4y ago
• formerkrogemp 4y ago
  I don't know if the US is going suffer food insecurity in the short term anywhere near as soon as other countries. I fear that with heat waves/drought in India, the Ukraine invasion, drought in the American west, and climate change broadly leading to crop failures food prices will remain elevated for years to come. I don't think people want to hear "give up meat" speaking as someone who has mostly given up meat (pork, poultry, and beef) for fish and mushrooms. I guess slow conversion is best. I've been feeding relatives mushrooms where they've never had them before in effort to reduce meat consumption to some, admittedly, limited success. I do worry for the future.
• adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > Shift away from animal based protein rapidly While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things. A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised. I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu. And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable. [1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).
• macinjosh 4y ago
  Have you ever been to a farm and ranch? A grazing pasture is not the same as a crop field. Pastures are on land not suitable for crops due to size, shape, terrain, soil etc. Sometimes livestock is even put on crop fields to help enrich the soil and to let the animals eat remnants from a harvest. Land limitations are not a problem.
  • ryanmercer 4y ago
    >Have you ever been to a farm and ranch? Have you ever been to a feed lot? It is not a pretty little hilly patch of land with cows wandering aimlessly around nibbling on grass. The vast majority of cattle are, at a minimum, finished on a feedlot. A patch of dirt, packed in as much as movement allows, and fed grain via a trough for half (or more) of their weight gain.
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      That's an argument against feedlots, don't try to frame it as one against consuming beef or meat in general.
• gruez 4y ago
  >- Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs Easier said than done. After all, if businesses are literally throwing their product out, it's probably for a good reason (ie. trying to recover it is more expensive than buying more)
• kristjansson 4y ago
  So many assumptions about smooth substitution in this stat. * How much of that land is pasture, and cannot be viably used for other purposes? * How much of the remaining arable land is suitable for growing plants humans will consume directly? * How much of the corn/soy/etc that can be viably grown on the balance would humans choose to eat? We're very, very good at growing bulk crops, but not so excited about eating them. Feeding the excess to animals, and eating the animals makes ~1/3 of that productive capacity available (and appetizing) to humans. Modulo environmental impacts of CAFOs and such (which need to be addressed) that's a pretty efficient use of excess productive capacity for bulk crops beyond demand for human consumption.