• reddig33@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.

    The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can’t work at mass consumption and production levels we see today

      The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy

      That’s going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it’s horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)

      For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn’t enough land to support anything close to current consumption

      we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

      https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

      • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        Why the focus on “efficiency” with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don’t want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.

        Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          This is not some trivial difference. I talk about efficiency because we’re talking about substantial portions of entire global resources. The difference is many order of magnitudes between any animal products and plants. It’s enough to change the entire environment of our planet

          I think that deserves far more weight than “culture”. Because something is tradition is no good reason to keep doing something

          Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.

          https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

          And that land for instance can come from places like the Amazon rainforest

          Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation

          https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/unsustainable_cattle_ranching/

          • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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            2 months ago

            Forbid food exports, problem solved. Americans can grow their own food and enjoy their own burgers on their own land just fine.

            • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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              2 months ago

              This is not a problem of exports. The US eats way animal products more per capita. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough

              https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-global-habitable-land-needed-for-agriculture-if-everyone-had-the-diet-of

              The land usage itself isn’t free either. It comes with costs

              Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases

              https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

              And that’s not to mention the emissions which are enough to make us miss climate targets on their own if we ignore them. We must address fossil fuels and animal agriculture

              To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

              (emphasis mine)

              https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          it turns out that eating bugs

          I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?

          I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?

          • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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            2 months ago

            I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?

            I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?

            I’m sure the alex jones crew bring it up all the time when talking about the secret global conspiracy or whatever, but I bring it up because bugs are a legitimate food source. One that is extremely efficient in terms of both resources and space, but just because eating bugs is more “efficient” then eating beef, doesn’t mean that we should all eat bugs. Generally this is uncontroversial, but some environmentalists dismiss food culture and variety of diets amongst humans in pursuit of maximizing some other metric but they aren’t very clear on what their goals are, let alone the why.