People do not need to starve to death. We use a ton of land to grow a ton of plants that we then feed to a ton of animals which we then feed to humans. Or we

People do not need to starve to death. We use a ton of land to grow a ton of plants that we then feed to a ton of animals which we then feed to humans. Or we could, you know, just eat the plants. Calculations vary (a lot), but doing that could reduce global agricultural land use from 4 billion hectares to just 1.†. On top of that we're completely wasting 30-40% of the food we do produce.†† This is not to say that all meat consumption is 'inefficient'. Cattle can graze on land that is not suitable for farming, and animals generally eat more of the physical plants than we do (animals on a feedlot are often eating fibrous parts of the plant like stalks and stubble and not just the parts we humans like to eat). But there's no way around it, industrialized meat in its current form is an extraordinarily inefficient use of land and has terrible environmental consequences. Also relevant to any discussion on fertilizer is that excessive usage basically destroys the soil. We've moved away from time-tested methods of managing crops through things like crop rotation, cover crops, promoting natural vegetation in key areas... to over-tilling, over-fertilizing, mono-cropping, and this is taking its toil on the ground we use to farm. Fertilizer is also responsible for eutrophication (nutrient pollution) which destroys local ecosystems and poisons the water. Not to mention nutrition != calories. Fertilizer is absolutely a modern technological wonder which has allowed humanity to produce food at tremendous scale, and I would not argue that it does not have its place in farming. But the current singular focus on "more yield per hectare" is a very modern, naive approach to farming that throws out a ton of considerations, and is absolutely unecessary. † https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets †† https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs