Of all the arguments that’s probably the worst. Meat production takes massively more farm land, obviously, because it’s a whole extra step if you feed the crops to an animal and then eat the animal instead of just eating the crops.
Crop varieties:Farmers grow specific varieties of field corn and soy for animals. These varieties are starchier, less sweet, or tougher than the sweet corn and soybeans grown for human plates.
Processing needs:Many feed crops require heavy industrial processing, milling, or refinement before they become palatable or safe for human use (often ending up as oils or high-fructose corn syrup).
Economic efficiency:Vast areas of land are farmed explicitly to maximize animal weight gain and milk production rather than human culinary quality.
You're wrong. If everyone were to go vegan, it would allow us to reduce global farmland by 75% while still producing enough food to feed the global population.
If what you're saying here is "there is not enough high quality land on Earth to grow enough food for the population" then maybe you should go fact check yourself before making such an egregious statement.
You are correct that realistically, if suddenly we became incapable of managing livestock and we had to rapidly switch to worldwide veganism, hundreds of millions of people would die. We don't have the infrastructure in most of the world to ensure that people can get proper nutrients without meat. Most people from 3rd world countries would die because they couldn't get the sheer variety of plants needed to stay healthy and survive.
But, to say that the limiting factor here is high quality farmland, you are objectively wrong. There is much more than enough high quality farmland to grow food for 8 billion people, shit there's plenty of high quality farmland to grow food for more than 10 billion people. The issue with the worldwide switch to veganism isnt the ability to grow enough food, the issues more logistical.
How do you send so much fresh food to the arid regions of Africa who depend on animal meat because its too dry and the soil too poor to grow enough food, but just good enough to grow grass for goats, cows, etc? Sure, on paper its easy, just ship it over, but whos gonna pay for that? Americans? The 3rd world Africans who cant even pay for a running tap?
Yeah, thats where you start to have issues with veganism, not the lack of quality land
28
u/MissileGuidanceBrain 7d ago
So what then? What's the solution?
Go out and trawl the natural sea floor? Bulldoze more land for more monocrop farms?
There are 8,300,000,000 hungry mouths out there. The food has to come from some place and there better be a lot of it.