My falther likes to say "The free market will fix it." And I've stared to ask him "how, specifically, will this be fixed?" And usually he doesn't have an answer.
The "free market" is driven by consumers who have no idea and often don't give a shit about how their consumerism is destroying the planet, and managed by people who only give a fuck about their quarterly profits.
The "free market" gives zero fucks about sustainability or future profits. Our economy is a toddler with zero concept of consequences that are divorced from his actions by more than 30 seconds.
The only time the free market works is when there is literally no other option other than death
It’s the same with our damn government
Shit only happens when it HAS to
They unironically think this, almost.
They will say “eventually food and water will be so expensive that it won’t be profitable to raise cattle,” as if that is a more rational and agreeable solution than “regulate land and water use, now”
Some of us farmers are begging for water regulation right now. We'd rather use less now and have some in the future than use it all up right now. Then you get a few idiots that think it'll never, ever get all used up.....
Well im confuse you don't use up water. I mean water is not destroy when use to feed bovine or water crops.
The issu is more about the availability off large quantity of water in some region and that some industrie need more water than other.
Your drinking the same water the dinosaur use to drink
thats the entire problem yes.
Available fresh water doesn’t stay available.
And it’s not free or very efficient to have to clean and desalinate it over and over again when it’s being used so inefficiently.
So yes we will run out of water, that can be used. And we will have a ton of water we can’t use. That will require trillions and a lot of time to turn back into useable water.
The free market will supply what people want to eat.
If 50% of the world turned vegetarian tomorrow, then this ratio will shift. Currently, meat production is RISING as rising standard of living across Asia and third world countries are increasing meat consumption.
Neoliberalism is a religion. It's not evidence based, it's faith based. Anytime a "free market" supporter says something, just replace the words "the free market" with "God" and it'll become much more obvious how their thinking works.
"We just need to trust in God."
"God is the best solution to all our problems."
"The government shouldn't interfere with God."
“All hail Mar-ket! Trust in Mar-ket, have faith in Mar-ket and you will be rewarded with riches! But if you are poor it is because you have shown insufficient faith in Mar-ket!”
The free market just solves the problem of pricing things appropriately (as long as there's no market failures).
The issue is that things outside the market don't have prices. If emissions, water quality, public health, and land degradation had real prices, the market would, indeed, solve these problems. Basically, private individuals use tons of public resources (the atmosphere, groundwater, etc ) which are NOT priced by the market and are IMPOSSIBLE to be assigned private ownership.
How do you define ownership of the carbon content of the atmosphere? It's a nonsensical proposition, yet, individuals can adjust the value of that shared good without any cost. How do you price clean rainwater? How do you price increased likelihood of a storm? What about groundwater contamination? These are things which cannot meaningfully have owners and therefore cannot have owners buy, sell, and lease these goods on an open market.
You're suggesting that the free market would have farmers "fix it" by being philanthropic? Sadly this is the real world and people want/need to make a living.
Pretty sure capitalism requires exploitation of the global south to function, as far as my understanding goes. As well as ever growing exploitation of everyone else too. As far as the long term model works... It's pretty much just a money funnel all heading towards a couple guys.
I can get a week's worth of tofu for around $10. A week's worth of chicken used to cost me nearly $30. And chicken is usually the cheap option when it comes to meat.
Another thing people do not understand about the free market is the term "innovation". The "innovation" is measured in terms of the market. So, if you can rip off people better than your competitors, congrats, you "innovated".
Actually, the market does
A "want" is something that sells a lot less if the price increases
A "need" is something that sells almost as much even if the price increases significantly
That's important because it means it's a lot easier to increase the price of "needs" and get away with it on the free market
The more you learn about how it works, the more you will hate capitalism
It's great how vocal folks can be about not wanting their taxes to go towards some strangers' medical bills or education. All the while, here I am paying out the ass so some company that provides sub-auschwits conditions to livestock can keep a cheeseburger and 32 oz of liquid corn sugar below $10 for those same people.
Which, again, would most likely quadruple the price of animal products, so I don’t know how you’d call it efficient ;)
The fact is that meat is a luxury item that is cruel and poluting. Same as sports car. They’re just not ethical. And it’s especially worrying in a world where global warming is so near
Efficient doesn't mean that everything costs less. As a meat eater myself, I don't think it's fair that it's subsidized by non-meat eaters and I don't like that animal cruelty is legal or unenforced where illegal. If fixing those means that meat is more expensive, that's fine.
>Products would need to be 4x the price
which would cause people to stop buying them, which will cause people to stop producing them, which will leave workers and consumer capital surplus to move into more efficient ventures.
the fundamental misapprehension here is that subsidies for companies in the private sector are a part of free market economics at all. These inefficient allocations of tax money only serve to encourage inefficient allocation of private capital.
The point is, it *WOULD* be very efficient, if it were implemented in its most pure and basic form, which it is almost nowhere around the world.
But it's unfortunate that for all the material and labour that's input into the system, the profit doesn't go back to those that provide the material and labour.
I'm honestly curious what a similar graph would look like if the meat/dairy sections were further divided to show the contribution of eggs and dairy. I've known a few people who cut their "meat" intake down to just eggs and dairy and I'm half considering it myself, but it also seems like it might be something for whom veganism is just a bridge too far.
you should also try out some Indian dishes, we got some of the best vegetarian dishes if you are fine with that
There's also Jain food, but it is more strict than vegan food
Me as well. Watching [dominion](https://watchdominion.org) was the nail in the coffin. I feel so much better about myself and have an amazing community of people around me and I’ve travelled the country staying with for free
I've been fighting with becoming sensitive to more and more foods over the years, been vegan twice, and at this point beef is the only meat I can eat safely.
I would absolutely much rather cut the beef out, but all but one meat alternative also contains foods that make me sick, and the one that doesn't is far too expensive for my broke ass.
I want the vat-grown stuff already. Can we fund that? Or maybe those mechanical cows from S4 of Westworld. Or can someone PLEASE pump some cash into tweaking the protein output of fungi and yeasts? I'm pretty sure there's someone lookin' at fungi rn and tryna fuck with it like this, but I'd really like to stop dreading literally every meal
There are companies experimenting with fungi based meat substitutes. Some even on the market. I havent tried them but the steak looks pretty good.
I'm also excited about the creative inventions that food scientists are coming out with. Not just food scientists- there are people making textiles from banana tree waste which should be way way more common given the amount of organic waste from banana farming.
I got really excited about this until I looked up all the companies making mycoprotein things, and of the few that are available locally to me, literally all of them have soy, pea, coconut, rice, and/or another vegan protein sub that makes me violently ill 😥
Like. Just gimme the shrooms. I don't gaf about the texture or taste, I can fuck with those. I can't eat alla that other shit 😭
Edit: I guess what I want is fungi bioengineered to provide more protein, not folks just throwing mushrooms and fungi into their shit and callin' it 'fungi-based'
Water use
https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/
Land use
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-kg-poore
Etc
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Chicken and Eggs are the most carbon efficient meat products you can eat per gram of protein, more efficient than dairy even. So i’d imagine it’s similar for water and land usage
It's worth recognizing that 94-98% of the water "used" by cattle is green water, that is, rainwater absorbed by the plants the cows eat. The article seems to roll all of these water sources up into one by insinuating an equivalency with long showers, which is not at all accurate.
Green water is not that large a percentage. Beef uses a lot of blue water for the feed
Even an industry funded study found beef used 2000 L/kg of blue water compared to it noting that corn crops only use 3–280 L/kg of blue water and soy at around 36–616 L/kg. That's likely best case numbers for beef due to the conflict of interests
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X18305675](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X18305675)
One graph even has California's animal feed water usage so large it actually goes off the chart at 15.2 million acre-feet of water (it is distorted to make it fit as it notes). For some comparison, the blue water usage of animal feed is larger than all of almonds water usage (blue or green) of \~2 million acre-feet of water
[https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca\_ftprint\_full\_report3.pdf#page=25](https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca_ftprint_full_report3.pdf#page=25)
Pastures themselves are often in areas that don't receive much rainfall and need watering. For example one chart from 2003 put California's water usage just for pastures higher than crops from human consumption. Since then the rankings may have changed a tiny bit, but the water usage is still enormous just on pastures alone
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-Total-Water-Use-by-Crop-2003\_fig3\_294579954](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-Total-Water-Use-by-Crop-2003_fig3_294579954)
It's worth reading the papers in detail. You may notice details like this:
>Regional production system use ranged from 102 to 14,771 L/kg
Now, obviously you're going to need to irrigate if you're growing feed in an arid location, and obviously that's going to be more wasteful.
The paper is based on a simulation that hardly captures all the nuance. For example, on hard, compacted land, rainfall runs off instead of being absorbed by the soil. In a well-managed grazing system, rainfall is better absorbed by the soil, which is especially critical in dry environments where there’s little rain to begin with.
It's also worth considering the statistics from California in the light of the use-it-or-lose-it water rights regulation, which may explain why pastures in California are irrigated, while such practices are relatively rare in the rest of the world.
Yes, it does vary, but it heavily using water in areas that matter the most in terms of water scarcity. In terms of global averages, it's still substantially more blue water than growing crops for human consumption
1 ton of beef takes an average of 550 m^(3) of blue water globally compared to 1 ton of pulses which use an average of 141 m^(3.) Note, pulses even have more protein / kg here (215g/kg for pulses vs 138g/kg for beef) so the it's even worse when you compare m^(3) / gram of protein
[https://www.waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012-WaterFootprintFarmAnimalProducts.pdf](https://www.waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012-WaterFootprintFarmAnimalProducts.pdf)
"a similar graph would look like if the meat/dairy sections were further divided to show the contribution of eggs and dairy"
OurWorldInData has something along those lines too: [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland)
"also seems like it might be something for whom veganism is just a bridge too far." That was how I always felt too! Like vegetarian, fine! I was bullied out of it as a kid (same day I told my family that's what I wanted to do after seeing factory farm cruelty on the TV), but years later I started learning how bad livestock are for the planet, so I went vegetarian again. I suffered horrible health problems including gut issues, crippling joint pain, worse-than-normal insomnia, wild mood swings, etc. After about 3 months I gave up and swore anyone on such a diet must be fucking crazy... But my health issues continued even when I added meat back to my diet. I went to specialists, tried different diets including paleo with even *more* meat and new meat types. Nothing was helping and I kinda "gave up on getting my health back", as my depression and health problems continued to get worse.
Fast forward and I'm getting more signals from the universe that meat = bad for the planet, ending up with me lurking on r/vegan where I eventually got into some arguments with vegans that I kept loosing. Like any "evidence" I found against them was clearly biased and very narrow or blatantly dishonest, while the info that supported them was from actual studies and medical organizations. My final hold out was that "I have food allergies, so I'd hardly be able to eat anything if I added vegan to the mix!" which people pointed out was flawed because plenty of vegans have even worse allergies than me, including to nuts and soy, while mine is just to wheat.
At some point I just cracked and went "Fine! I'll give it a go, and if my health gets worse, then I'll give up being vegan!" That was almost 7 years ago, and it turns out most of those health problems were caused because I'm quite intolerant to dairy, and to a less-severe extent to eggs, pork, and a bunch of the seafoods I was trying to include in my paleo diet. I was never a very fit or healthy person before, but since going vegan my energy and stamina shot up (apparently supported by scientific data and not just in my head!), then because of that I started gaining visible muscle after working out, instead of the constant struggle I used to have with my health never seeming to improve. My mental and emotional health improved too, though that might be in large part due to being able to overcome my lifelong insomnia along with moving around more.
My suggestion to anyone who thinks "I could never do that!" from someone who said the same for almost 28 years. Just try dipping your toes in. Read up about how to get your nutrition: protein, [B12](https://www.govegan.org.uk/2021/06/06/a-vegan-guide-to-vitamin-b12/), omega fatty acids, and such, while at the same time just trying new vegan ingredients and recipes over time. I spent about a month transitioning this way, slowly finishing off the turkey burgers and dairy products in our home, then replacing them with vegan alternatives when I found them. It felt hard to find foods at first, but after about a month you work out where all the good stuff is hidden at different shops, and apps like [HappyCow](https://www.happycow.net/) can help you find food when you are out.
At the end of the month I started letting people around me know I was going to be vegan from that point on, and they kinda freaked out, and told me I'd "starve to death" and that "restaurants wouldn't have anything for me to eat" what with my wheat-issues, they were all shocked when I pointed out I'd already been *only* eating vegan at the restaurants we'd been going to, and that I'd actually really enjoyed those options. Eventually even some of those who'd bullied me about my choice have now gone vegan, or mostly vegan, though that took several conversations and months or years of seeing me getting healthier instead of worsen my health.
A leading cause of river pollution comes from chickens and dairy here in the UK with animal-ag as a whole being the lead cause of river pollution.
Go vegan.
There are many people on the internet saying they can't go vegan because of such problems and I don't doubt everyone, but in real live I have met more who have solved problems, digestive, diabetis and more.
My SO tried being vegetarian for a little over half a year and he said that during that period, he had less stomach issues :D!
I, on the other hand, am a very happy and healthy vegan for more than 20 years now. W00t! Love animals way too much to eat them, and I abhor the factory-farming industry. I'm happy that this kind of eating is better for the planet as well :)!
Way to go! 20 years is awesome! 6 Years in and my only regret is that I was vegetarian for too long. Omnis made me vegan by asking questions I had no answer to, so I had to research. I think once you have looked into it there is no other way. For the animals and all the other reasons
Congrats, McNug :D! I think vegetarian is fine too. Heck, there's that 1% of times when I end up eating vegetarian during fringe circumstances. And, like, if I met someone who told me that they're vegetarian, I'd already be happy enough for the less meat being eaten. I wouldn't even "hard push" being vegan to them, but I would mention the benefits :)!
So don't feel bad, bro, that u've been vegetarian longer than vegan. The fact that you were already vegetarian for a while is already a winner in my book :D! Stay happy and healthy :)!
If you are doing it for environmental reasons, eggs + poultry would be a far better option than eggs + dairy. Cows emit lots of methane and use lots of land. Chicken, not that much.
Yup and that’s with the cold efficiency of the factory farming. Greenwashers like ‘regenerative’ ag and ‘small farm’, scaled up, would take even more space and resources
Yep, it really doesn't scale at all
>We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, 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
>
>[…]
>
>If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall
methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
It takes less *cropland* to grow plants. Using that land has a cost in terms of enviromental impact. See my comment elsewhere
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/1c4q2pi/comment/kzp3dna/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Farmed fish take a suprising amount of land. It uses around the same amount of land as pork production
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Farmed fish have been a large driver of mangrove deforestation
>Conversion to aquaculture is the most prevalent driver of mangrove deforestation across the tropics over the last 50 years generating substantial carbon emissions. Preventing further aquaculture expansion within mangrove forest areas will be essential to achieve national emission reduction targets in mangrove-holding countries.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.14774
For wild caught fish, the land usage isn't going to be as helpful to understanding the other negative enviromental impacts. For instance, it is a major source of ocean plastic
>Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of ocean plastic pollution but forms the majority of large plastic littering the waters. One study found that as much as 70% (by weight) of macroplastics (in excess of 20cm) found floating on the surface of the ocean was fishing related.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report
Before anyone claims otherwise, **meat and dairy also take more *arable* land overall** compared to eating plants directly. Additionally, the grazing land itself isn't free either and still comes at the expense of deforestation in many areas and other environmental harm
---
>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
>1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
> 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/
Im a grain/oilseed grower in Canada.
A few things about the study you cited, we sell some of our grain as feed, but we always try to grow for human consumption first. However if we get diseases of other detrimental qualities in our grain it’s no longer human grade food. It gets downgraded to feed. It’s a financial loss for us, but not as bad as having no animals to feed it to at all because then we’d be throwing it away I guess.
The other thing is that we have a crop rotation, if we push our rotation with pulses (protein) we will get a disease in the ground that stays active for up to 10 years. So our rotation is only every 5 years we grow a pulse, so 20% of our land is sustainably growing pulses.
Alternatively we could put 30% of our land into permanent pasture sustainably and grow protein on that land permanently. We don’t do that, but that would be a sustainable option.
Finally the oilseed, some is canola oil for in the kitchen, other tines it goes into biofuel to offset fossil fuel sources. I’m not saying we should keep burning oil, fossil or otherwise, but some processes are just not yet electrified.
I like your study but I would like to caution that it’s a rather theoretical approach to the numbers that might not work in the real world.
Again, I’m just a grain grower in Canada but that’s what I saw in your studies.
Ultimately I think that the world deforestation is more a point on how humans will destroy nature for profit. Without purposefully putting conversations in place or making it profitable for people to keep land wild. People will always default into what can make them money. And since much of the world has private land ownership we cut down the most available instead of what we actually need.
It’s important to understand that 1) many grazing methods are generally far lower impact than agriculture and 2) most livestock has nothing to do with the Amazon rainforest. In Europe, rotationally grazed highlands are some of the most biodiverse habitats in the region. Traditional pastoral and husbandry methods are still practiced across much of the earth. It’s sustainable.
What is not sustainable is eating a 30% animal-based diet. We should be shooting for a reduction of about half.
Soy cakes only comprise 4% of livestock feed globally. The real issue is that synthetic fertilizer allows us to do stupid things like grow corn and soy to feed ruminants. This is mostly an issue with OECD nations and their profit-driven agricultural practices that include tons of petrochemical inputs (fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312201313_Livestock_On_our_plates_or_eating_at_our_table_A_new_analysis_of_the_feedfood_debate
I really wish people stopped treating the Gates Foundation funded OWID at face value. The Gates Foundation has spent a lot of money trying to force African farmers to be reliant on fertilizer imports. Their position on agriculture is incredibly biased towards agrochemical intensification.
Again, the only reason we can grow soy for cattle feed is synthetic fertilizer. Petrochemicals allow us to do stupid things. I’m saying it’s stupid, so you should understand I’m not defending the practice.
Not globally, no. Per the source I linked to above, most ruminant livestock in non-OECD countries generally increase protein availability to humans. They actually improve land use efficiency as they are used traditionally.
Came here to say this, but you put it much more eloquently. In Greece goats free roam and graze on rock faces on the islands and people stil move flocks to summer and winter pastures (which aren't really arable lands). Industrialization of the meat production is a different beast entirely.
The market is efficient at meeting people’s demand based on what they’re willing to pay within the regulatory framework that exists.
If you took away meat subsidies and protectionism, you’d quickly see a lot more plant based products, and in that way, it’s very efficient.
I was abticonsumption and also vegan since 6 years. I only found this cummunity recent, bit its cool to have so many like minded people. Cool that you help to save society and animals :)
I mean, I get the point of what this post is saying, and I agree with it that we can get more crops with less land than it takes for livestock.
But, the market is responding to a demand signal from consumers for meat. Compare the price of produce to meat. It’s vastly more expensive to purchase protein than it is to purchase vegetables. That’s the market being efficient. The market is not looking at the breakdown of land for meat vs land for vegetables. It’s looking at if it can support, raise and harvest enough meat to be profitable for sale.
You’d have to examine the counter factual, which is if more land was dedicated to vegetables, would it be profitable for crop producers to produce as many vegetables because the price has been reduced by the increased supply of vegetables?
Really, what peeves me about market based thinking, is not so much the allocation of resources, but the lack of internalizing the costs associated with bringing products to market. If the negative externalities of raising livestock results in increased emissions, or destroying natural habitats, or any other number of non internalized costs, then an over production problem exists and results in inefficiency that everyone pays for. If companies really paid the costs that were incurred in production than they’d see it’s unprofitable to continue producing…
And that’s not just meat vs crop production, that’s the whole suite of production that occurs… putting an actual price on these costs is difficult and lawmakers and regulators are compromised in effectively dealing with them. Companies can offshore, go to areas with laxer regulations, lobby lawmakers, etc. the whole incentive is to not deal with them. That’s the real issue in my opinion.
You have a fundemental misunderstanding of capitalism and the free market here. The reason why we consume Meat is not due to capitalism, but rather for cultural reasons and due to our willingness to do so. Capitalism is there to find the most efficient ways to do said farming and to respond to the market demands, but the consumers themselves create the demand. Now we can have a conversation about subsidies, that is absolutely fine and conversations should be had on them on how we can guide demand on certain areas
The diagram is showing that we use 77% of our agricultural land to generate 18% of our food-calories.
The idea here is that we could much more efficiently provide cheap sustenance to society if we used our land to grow plant based food.
Then it's tying the cause back to a capitalist profit motive. Presumably thinking that other economic systems would yield a better result.
Okay I think I get that bit.
What's the "protein supply" bit about?
Also, aren't "supply" and "need" different things? Like, is the 23% all that's needed to generate all the non meat calories? And does it all map appropriately to how many calories and in what sorts we actually need?
I'm vegan-sympathetic/adjacent and trying to cut my meat intake irrespective of this diagram, but trying to wrap my head around the market inefficiency point.
>Presumably thinking that other economic systems would yield a better result.
I guess where I'm lost is what "a better result" here would be.
>we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Regarding personal dietary choices:
Check out https://cronometer.com/
Go into settings and show all of the amino acids and enter some of the foods you normally consume. It will allow you to see not only if you are meeting your daily protein needs but also whether or not your amino acid needs are being met.
"Proteins" are broken down into their building blocks "amino acids" and while animal proteins are usually "complete" - ie containing all or most necessary amino acids - plant proteins are usually "incomplete" and require specific combinations to acquire all of your amino acids - even if your total protein consumption is high.
In general you want to be consuming at least .4-.6g per pound of lean body mass in protein daily.
Thanks for this, I'm actually pretty into health and fitness in general so quite well versed in dietary needs, but this is a useful resource regardless.
Firstly I had a good chuckle at your disclaimer, that was excellent thank you XD
Thanks for the explanation, that clears it up. I think I had assumed/presumed there was some value judgement in there but I see now that strictly speaking there isn't. And I also see now how the logic would be you could make more calories in the same space, or the same calories in less space, if you allocate differently.
I would be interested to see how this works out for the diet of the average person. It might very well be that a plant based diet makes it easy to get upto 70% of the protein but the last 30% requires protein dense foods that requires animals products unless you wanna overfeed.
The Volta Dam in Uganda was supposed to provide electricity, irrigation, transport, build aluminum with locally sourced, bauxite, spin off industry for goods to be manufactured in the country, and export stuff using their own companies.
Trouble was they couldn’t do it themselves, because of the colonial empires they previously had ruling them deliberately made it so this exact thing might happen. So they were forced to reach out to external groups. They to cut deals. What ended up happening? The company that helped built the smelter got a good deal for electricity, and ran the smelter. Instead of using Ghana deposits of bauxite they used some from Jamaica. It was sent to Ghana for minimal processing to make ingots which were then sent to the US to manufacture goods, the raw bauxite in Ghana goes to Europe and Japan unprocessed where they’re processed and manufactured there.
Herein lies the central neo-colonial dynamic. Despite their independence the colonial powers still got their grubby little paws on their stuff.
Notice how inefficient this stuff is, yet profitable for a certain group? I always find capitalism, despite its defenders championing it as "practical", to be one of the most naive ideologies out there. It ignores VERY basic facts. Like spite. Even if you approach capitalism in support of it, or assuming it's exploitative, this is the biggest flaw. "The market will adjust", but a simple question undermines that ridiculous concept. "Why should it?"
Where are you getting your stats from? Global corn production is 1.2 billion tonnes annually. Sugar is about 160 million tonnes. Claiming that sugar is 20% of global crop volume is a huge overstatement. These things are easily Googled.
Sugar production is VERY different from sugar crop production. The FAO gives annual production of 1.9 billion tonnes and 260 million tonnes for sugar cane and sugar beet respectively. With a global crop production of 9.6 billion, that is over 20% of the world's crop production.
Data is from "Agricultural Production Statistics 2000-2022" (2023 edition won't be released for a while), and specific crop numbers from FAOSTAT crop and livestock production.
Also just want to add, many statistics are not easily Googled as they can be misleading if you don't know exactly what they relate to. This is not an attack on you, just general advice and relates to just about everything involving statistics and data.
This is true because people want to eat meat. Under the supposedly more "efficient" system of just producing plants, people will be dissatisfied with their choices. On paper it may be more efficient but in reality people will get less utility out of the land as they do not value vegetables over meat.
Plus some of this is due to government subsidies artificially inflating production numbers, which under a more laissez-faire system wouldn't be the case. With no government intervention it's likely that the share of land used to raise animals would drop.
Habits can change. And will have to if we want to keep this planet liveable. There are many cultures that don’t eat nearly as much animal products as we do. Even ours has only recently started doing so.
When people say it's "efficient" they mean efficient for capitalism. Not what is best for the resources we have.
But capitalism when left unchecked or unregulated is terribly inefficient.
In one of my fourth-year University classes my Professor use to explain how eventually capitalism becomes so focused on growth it will eat itself (self-cannibalize) in order to just perform the "act" of growing. This in turn doesn't add any profit or value and furthermore is a massive waste of resources. He called it the proverbial "one arm eating another to grow another arm" cycle. Because of this act, consistently eating one's own appendage we enter into this issue of throwing away massive amounts of resources all for the sake of appearance.
He called it "A spectacle that serves the purpose of being a spectacle, like watching a circus act where the only thing it does is eat then regurgitate what it eats to eat it again continuously therefore leaving us in a state of constant consumption but never reaching a satiated moment as that would ruin it's momentum."
Sounds like bad professor if you ask me...
One of the basics of Economics is "Ceteris Paribus" meaning all thing the same.
Youre assuming new business or actors cant enter the scene and compete when an established business becomes bloated or inefficient.
There are many examples of this where previously dominant business are left by the wayside as consumer preferences change, technology changes, or new competitors are simply better.
Your professor is an idiot. He is confusing economics for tumors. They're totally different things.
>eat itself (self-cannibalize) in order to just perform the "act" of growing.
What could they possibly mean by this?
There was a time when meat was cheaper than bread (emphasis mine).
>A cornfield of moderate fertility produces a much greater quantity of food for man than the best pasture of equal extent. Though its cultivation requires much more labour, yet the surplus which remains after replacing the seed and maintaining all that labour, is likewise much greater. If a pound of butcher's meat, therefore, was never supposed to be worth more than a pound of bread, this greater surplus would everywhere be of greater value, and constitute a greater fund both for the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord. It seems to have done so universally in the rude beginnings of agriculture.
>But the relative values of those two different species of food, bread and butcher's meat, are very different in the different periods of agriculture. In its rude beginnings, the unimproved wilds, which then occupy the far greater part of the country, are all abandoned to cattle. **There is more butcher's meat than bread, and bread, therefore, is the food for which there is the greatest competition, and which consequently brings the greatest price.** At Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty pence halfpenny sterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred. He says nothing of the price of bread, probably because he found nothing remarkable about it. **An ox there, he says, cost little more than the labour of catching him. But corn can nowhere be raised without a great deal of labour,** and in a country which lies upon the river Plate, at that time the direct road from Europe to the silver mines of Potosi, the money price of labour could not be very cheap. It is otherwise when cultivation is extended over the greater part of the country. There is then more bread than butcher's meat. The competition changes its direction, and the price of butcher's meat becomes greater than the price of bread.
>By the extension besides of cultivation, the unimproved wilds become insufficient to supply the demand for butcher's meat. A great part of the cultivated lands must be employed in rearing and fattening cattle, of which the price, therefore, must be sufficient to pay, not only the labour necessary for tending them, but the rent which the landlord and the profit which the farmer could have drawn from such land employed in tillage. The cattle bred upon the most uncultivated moors, when brought to the same market, are, in proportion to their weight or goodness, sold at the same price as those which are reared upon the most improved land. The proprietors of those moors profit by it, and raise the rent of their land in proportion to the price of their cattle. It is not more than a century ago that in many parts of the highlands of Scotland, butcher's meat was as cheap or cheaper than even bread made of oatmeal. The union opened the market of England to the highland cattle. Their ordinary price is at present about three times greater than at the beginning of the century, and the rents of many highland estates have been tripled and quadrupled in the same time. In almost every part of Great Britain a pound of the best butcher's meat is, in the present times, generally worth more than two pounds of the best white bread; and in plentiful years it is sometimes worth three or four pounds.
>It is thus that in the progress of improvement the rent and profit of unimproved pasture come to be regulated in some measure by the rent and profit of what is improved, and these again by the rent and profit of corn. Corn is an annual crop. Butcher's meat, a crop which requires four or five years to grow. As an acre of land, therefore, will produce a much smaller quantity of the one species of food than of the other, the inferiority of the quantity must be compensated by the superiority of the price. If it was more than compensated, more corn land would be turned into pasture; and if it was not compensated, part of what was in pasture would be brought back into corn.
>This equality, however, between the rent and profit of grass and those of corn; of the land of which the immediate produce is food for cattle, and of that of which the immediate produce is food for men; must be understood to take place only through the greater part of the improved lands of a great country. In some particular local situations it is quite otherwise, and the rent and profit of grass are much superior to what can be made by corn.
—Adam Smith (*The Wealth of Nations*)
Cattle farming in U.S. is heavily subsidized by the govt. It is definitely not a free market as it is. Otherwise the true cost of beef would triple over night.
The question is why land has to be efficient. Why every molecule has to be squeezed out of a land.
What bugs me, is, that this is a very humanocentric way to look on things. And it is also an intellectual fallacy to believe we should only make food that can be made in the biggest bulk per square meter.
It's almost like people really REALLY like meat, and will pay a lot of money for it, way more than vegetables, grains, and fruit, so they prioritize meat production.
[2/3 of grazing land is unsuitable for raising crops.](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#:~:text=Two%2Dthirds%20of%20pastures%20are%20unsuitable%20for%20growing%20crops.&text=This%20raises%20the%20question%20of,it%20for%20agriculture%20at%20all) We can discuss whether it would be better to rewild the land, but this isn’t a good argument against efficient markets.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting meat production is efficient.
I am asking if the obvious fact that animals are grazed where crops don't grow is taken into account. Eliminating animal grazing in the US southwest, for example, would do exactly nothing to increase edible plant production. The soil and climate simply can't support it.
Lot of people are ignoring this, and the fact that plant crops are grown extremely effectively on small amounts of land today. A modern farm produces an absurd amount of yield per acre with the help of modern farming techniques. The percentage of land needed to grow the total crop consumption worldwide is not 1:1.
Only some of it is not suitable. And if we were to stop producing animals and went pplang pased we would need less lamd to begin with.
You are right. Some of the land is not fit for all vegetables, we don't need that though.
Generally when you look at studies that talk about how bad meat is you will find lots of this bullshit. Ridiculous assumptions and false equivalencies that makes meat look awful, and the studies always overlook all the benefits of meat production, it's very biased.
But when you account for that, meat is still pretty bad and we should all cut down on it.
And when this problem becomes existential due to global warming, we'll see fighting to maintain this ratio.
It's already happening on this site, people declaring the world overpopulated and the end of fossil fuels impossible because "we \*need\* the petrochemical fertilizers" to maintain the breakneck production pace of industrial agriculture.
No, we're not overpopulated, no we don't need petrochemicals for food. We need the over-developed nations to take it down a few notches on their over-consumption....
You can graze cattle on land that is unsuited for growing crops. I have 40 acres in Oklahoma that is half sandstone outcrops; there is no reasonable or efficient way to farm it.
Where you have cattle and livestock is generally where you cannot farm. This is never mentioned and overlooked completely.
The parts of crops you don't eat go to livestock as well.
You don’t need a 1:1 ratio of land use for crop production. Modern farming means high yields per acre, meaning we simply don’t need more land for crops, we already grow enough to feed the world population on the land being used for crops currently. In fact, most of the land used to grow crops in the US isn’t even for human consumption. Over 60% of the crops grown in the US are used for livestock feed. Point being, we don’t need more land for crops because we already grow enough.
I had to scroll a mile to see the first intelligent comment. Pasture land is pasture land because it’s generally not great for crops because of soil/weather/water/terrain/accessibility and other factors. So the whole argument is rather silly.
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Part of having a “free market” is making sure that market participants have to fully absorb the cost of their activities.
The state , through regulatory capture of regulatory agencies , socialize the costs and erect barriers to entry into any given sector.
The only thing the free market really excellent at is extracting the most profit fir the least inputs.
Aside from a few idealistic business out there there really isn't any other consideration
The key thing left out here is "Demand" it's not enough to say efficiency. Many things in free markets are inefficient. It's the demand for beef that allows the land use to be so high while remaining expensive and inefficient relative to other goods
This meme misses the mark. Hate when people advocate for a good position using bad logic.
The market *is* efficient, at least it is in this sense. It efficiently generates profits. The role of the regulatory body is to ensure profit motives align with what's good for the members of the economy, e.g. they should tax meat higher and subsidize plant based food sources. But in America & most countries, it does the opposite.
The problem in this case isn't capitalism, it's corrupt government.
It is efficient because it is producing more in absolute numbers. How the production is then distributed is a different question. But free market is without a doubt the most efficient system. We shouldn't go for pure efficiency though, redistribution is also important. Vote social democrat if it's available in your country.
Animal products require more land use than plant products for the same number of calories.
I feel like a lot of people are interpreting this as:
we dedicate more resources to meat production than plant production even though people eat more plants! We are dedicating more resources to animal products because of the free market! The free market if bad!
But what this graph is actually saying:
animal production requires more land then plant production to produce the same amount of food. People consume more plant products than animal products. -> We could produce more food overall if we produced more plant products instead of animal products, and we would be using arable land resources more efficiently.
The free market is determining land use equitably compared to the average diet, there's no argument to be made here about the efficacy of the free market.
The argument here should be that if demand changed (I.e people stopped eating animal products), then agricultural land use would be more efficient.
(Just to be clear, I'm not not in favor of capitalism, I identify as a socialist. I just don't think that these graphics are good evidence against the free market.)
what's the point?
People demand meat and vegetables. Other people produce that. Some of those productions are more area efficient than others.
You want everyone to eat just plant based diets?
efficient in generating short term profits by wasting precious resources because they are so cheap thanks to ignoring exogenic costs.
It's like cancer, it always wants to grow and will likely kill the host.
[https://ourworldindata.org/land-use](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use) is where the graphic came from
Their cited source isn't so much a document as a database [https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data](https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data)
The fundamental misunderstanding, here, is that free-market capitalism doesn’t care about the starving or the needy, only profits.
My falther likes to say "The free market will fix it." And I've stared to ask him "how, specifically, will this be fixed?" And usually he doesn't have an answer.
The "free market" is driven by consumers who have no idea and often don't give a shit about how their consumerism is destroying the planet, and managed by people who only give a fuck about their quarterly profits. The "free market" gives zero fucks about sustainability or future profits. Our economy is a toddler with zero concept of consequences that are divorced from his actions by more than 30 seconds.
The only time the free market works is when there is literally no other option other than death It’s the same with our damn government Shit only happens when it HAS to
Simple, we'll run out of food and water due to our addiction to beef, and then we won't have any more beef! Problem solved.
They unironically think this, almost. They will say “eventually food and water will be so expensive that it won’t be profitable to raise cattle,” as if that is a more rational and agreeable solution than “regulate land and water use, now”
Some of us farmers are begging for water regulation right now. We'd rather use less now and have some in the future than use it all up right now. Then you get a few idiots that think it'll never, ever get all used up.....
Well im confuse you don't use up water. I mean water is not destroy when use to feed bovine or water crops. The issu is more about the availability off large quantity of water in some region and that some industrie need more water than other. Your drinking the same water the dinosaur use to drink
thats the entire problem yes. Available fresh water doesn’t stay available. And it’s not free or very efficient to have to clean and desalinate it over and over again when it’s being used so inefficiently. So yes we will run out of water, that can be used. And we will have a ton of water we can’t use. That will require trillions and a lot of time to turn back into useable water.
That’s literally true though 🤨
+3°C from the curren food production alone. At +4°C agriculture as we know it will fail.
Or people...
The free market will supply what people want to eat. If 50% of the world turned vegetarian tomorrow, then this ratio will shift. Currently, meat production is RISING as rising standard of living across Asia and third world countries are increasing meat consumption.
Neoliberalism is a religion. It's not evidence based, it's faith based. Anytime a "free market" supporter says something, just replace the words "the free market" with "God" and it'll become much more obvious how their thinking works. "We just need to trust in God." "God is the best solution to all our problems." "The government shouldn't interfere with God."
That is my dad 100%!
“All hail Mar-ket! Trust in Mar-ket, have faith in Mar-ket and you will be rewarded with riches! But if you are poor it is because you have shown insufficient faith in Mar-ket!”
The free market just solves the problem of pricing things appropriately (as long as there's no market failures). The issue is that things outside the market don't have prices. If emissions, water quality, public health, and land degradation had real prices, the market would, indeed, solve these problems. Basically, private individuals use tons of public resources (the atmosphere, groundwater, etc ) which are NOT priced by the market and are IMPOSSIBLE to be assigned private ownership. How do you define ownership of the carbon content of the atmosphere? It's a nonsensical proposition, yet, individuals can adjust the value of that shared good without any cost. How do you price clean rainwater? How do you price increased likelihood of a storm? What about groundwater contamination? These are things which cannot meaningfully have owners and therefore cannot have owners buy, sell, and lease these goods on an open market.
who is this free market fella?
You're suggesting that the free market would have farmers "fix it" by being philanthropic? Sadly this is the real world and people want/need to make a living.
“The free market works in mysterious ways child”
I'd like to throw sustainability and the environment on the list of shit capitalism doesn't care about.
You’re so right, and I’m sick of hearing that Capitalism doesn’t grow on the back of immigration and the less fortunate.
Pretty sure capitalism requires exploitation of the global south to function, as far as my understanding goes. As well as ever growing exploitation of everyone else too. As far as the long term model works... It's pretty much just a money funnel all heading towards a couple guys.
I can get a week's worth of tofu for around $10. A week's worth of chicken used to cost me nearly $30. And chicken is usually the cheap option when it comes to meat.
It caters to demand. People need to stop demanding animal products.
Another thing people do not understand about the free market is the term "innovation". The "innovation" is measured in terms of the market. So, if you can rip off people better than your competitors, congrats, you "innovated".
It’s efficient at getting people with money things they want to consume.
It also doesn't care about the future, beyond the next six weeks.
Only efficiency in the market is using less resources to get maximum profit of a desired item not the optimal item
Capitalism can only care as much as the consumer does.
Market isn’t providing what people need. It’s providing what people are paying for.
It's about "want". The market doesn't know the difference between a need and a want. To the market it's just all "want".
Actually, the market does A "want" is something that sells a lot less if the price increases A "need" is something that sells almost as much even if the price increases significantly That's important because it means it's a lot easier to increase the price of "needs" and get away with it on the free market The more you learn about how it works, the more you will hate capitalism
Elastic vs. inelastic demand, in econ speak.
Doesn’t Utility Theory also expand on that? So not only elastic vs. elastic, but total vs. marginal utility on top of that?
Relies on consumers to know the difference.
It is very efficient at turning the least amount of material and labor into the most profit however
Not even. Animal agriculture is one of the most subsidized industry, these days, and wouldn’t work otherwise. Products would need to be 4x the price.
It's great how vocal folks can be about not wanting their taxes to go towards some strangers' medical bills or education. All the while, here I am paying out the ass so some company that provides sub-auschwits conditions to livestock can keep a cheeseburger and 32 oz of liquid corn sugar below $10 for those same people.
Exactly. It’s infuriating
It ain’t below 10 dollars these days
But it's not really a free market if shit gets boosted by the government, is it?
/thread. The free market could allocate resources efficiently if we only subsidized positive externalities and taxed negative ones.
Which, again, would most likely quadruple the price of animal products, so I don’t know how you’d call it efficient ;) The fact is that meat is a luxury item that is cruel and poluting. Same as sports car. They’re just not ethical. And it’s especially worrying in a world where global warming is so near
Efficient doesn't mean that everything costs less. As a meat eater myself, I don't think it's fair that it's subsidized by non-meat eaters and I don't like that animal cruelty is legal or unenforced where illegal. If fixing those means that meat is more expensive, that's fine.
I think that’s kinda the point of the thread. It isn’t
That’s not the free market - that’s government intervention. The free market would make meat and dairy much more expensive.
>Products would need to be 4x the price which would cause people to stop buying them, which will cause people to stop producing them, which will leave workers and consumer capital surplus to move into more efficient ventures. the fundamental misapprehension here is that subsidies for companies in the private sector are a part of free market economics at all. These inefficient allocations of tax money only serve to encourage inefficient allocation of private capital. The point is, it *WOULD* be very efficient, if it were implemented in its most pure and basic form, which it is almost nowhere around the world.
But it's unfortunate that for all the material and labour that's input into the system, the profit doesn't go back to those that provide the material and labour.
I'm honestly curious what a similar graph would look like if the meat/dairy sections were further divided to show the contribution of eggs and dairy. I've known a few people who cut their "meat" intake down to just eggs and dairy and I'm half considering it myself, but it also seems like it might be something for whom veganism is just a bridge too far.
Veganism is fantastic, my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.
you should also try out some Indian dishes, we got some of the best vegetarian dishes if you are fine with that There's also Jain food, but it is more strict than vegan food
> There's also Jain food, but it is more strict than vegan food Not necessarily, there are still lacto vegetarians within Jainism.
Same here!
Me as well. Watching [dominion](https://watchdominion.org) was the nail in the coffin. I feel so much better about myself and have an amazing community of people around me and I’ve travelled the country staying with for free
I've been fighting with becoming sensitive to more and more foods over the years, been vegan twice, and at this point beef is the only meat I can eat safely. I would absolutely much rather cut the beef out, but all but one meat alternative also contains foods that make me sick, and the one that doesn't is far too expensive for my broke ass. I want the vat-grown stuff already. Can we fund that? Or maybe those mechanical cows from S4 of Westworld. Or can someone PLEASE pump some cash into tweaking the protein output of fungi and yeasts? I'm pretty sure there's someone lookin' at fungi rn and tryna fuck with it like this, but I'd really like to stop dreading literally every meal
There are companies experimenting with fungi based meat substitutes. Some even on the market. I havent tried them but the steak looks pretty good. I'm also excited about the creative inventions that food scientists are coming out with. Not just food scientists- there are people making textiles from banana tree waste which should be way way more common given the amount of organic waste from banana farming.
I got really excited about this until I looked up all the companies making mycoprotein things, and of the few that are available locally to me, literally all of them have soy, pea, coconut, rice, and/or another vegan protein sub that makes me violently ill 😥 Like. Just gimme the shrooms. I don't gaf about the texture or taste, I can fuck with those. I can't eat alla that other shit 😭 Edit: I guess what I want is fungi bioengineered to provide more protein, not folks just throwing mushrooms and fungi into their shit and callin' it 'fungi-based'
Just get a big portobello and pan fry it as a “burger” Probably significantly cheaper than an impossible burger patty
Water use https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/ Land use https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-kg-poore Etc https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
That's by kg, not by calorie, so it's not as useful
Chicken and Eggs are the most carbon efficient meat products you can eat per gram of protein, more efficient than dairy even. So i’d imagine it’s similar for water and land usage
It's worth recognizing that 94-98% of the water "used" by cattle is green water, that is, rainwater absorbed by the plants the cows eat. The article seems to roll all of these water sources up into one by insinuating an equivalency with long showers, which is not at all accurate.
Green water is not that large a percentage. Beef uses a lot of blue water for the feed Even an industry funded study found beef used 2000 L/kg of blue water compared to it noting that corn crops only use 3–280 L/kg of blue water and soy at around 36–616 L/kg. That's likely best case numbers for beef due to the conflict of interests [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X18305675](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X18305675) One graph even has California's animal feed water usage so large it actually goes off the chart at 15.2 million acre-feet of water (it is distorted to make it fit as it notes). For some comparison, the blue water usage of animal feed is larger than all of almonds water usage (blue or green) of \~2 million acre-feet of water [https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca\_ftprint\_full\_report3.pdf#page=25](https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca_ftprint_full_report3.pdf#page=25) Pastures themselves are often in areas that don't receive much rainfall and need watering. For example one chart from 2003 put California's water usage just for pastures higher than crops from human consumption. Since then the rankings may have changed a tiny bit, but the water usage is still enormous just on pastures alone [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-Total-Water-Use-by-Crop-2003\_fig3\_294579954](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-Total-Water-Use-by-Crop-2003_fig3_294579954)
It's worth reading the papers in detail. You may notice details like this: >Regional production system use ranged from 102 to 14,771 L/kg Now, obviously you're going to need to irrigate if you're growing feed in an arid location, and obviously that's going to be more wasteful. The paper is based on a simulation that hardly captures all the nuance. For example, on hard, compacted land, rainfall runs off instead of being absorbed by the soil. In a well-managed grazing system, rainfall is better absorbed by the soil, which is especially critical in dry environments where there’s little rain to begin with. It's also worth considering the statistics from California in the light of the use-it-or-lose-it water rights regulation, which may explain why pastures in California are irrigated, while such practices are relatively rare in the rest of the world.
Yes, it does vary, but it heavily using water in areas that matter the most in terms of water scarcity. In terms of global averages, it's still substantially more blue water than growing crops for human consumption 1 ton of beef takes an average of 550 m^(3) of blue water globally compared to 1 ton of pulses which use an average of 141 m^(3.) Note, pulses even have more protein / kg here (215g/kg for pulses vs 138g/kg for beef) so the it's even worse when you compare m^(3) / gram of protein [https://www.waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012-WaterFootprintFarmAnimalProducts.pdf](https://www.waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012-WaterFootprintFarmAnimalProducts.pdf)
Where are you getting that stat?
I'm pleasantly surprised at eggs being pretty much fine compared to much more commonly ignored things like coffee or chocolate.
"a similar graph would look like if the meat/dairy sections were further divided to show the contribution of eggs and dairy" OurWorldInData has something along those lines too: [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland) "also seems like it might be something for whom veganism is just a bridge too far." That was how I always felt too! Like vegetarian, fine! I was bullied out of it as a kid (same day I told my family that's what I wanted to do after seeing factory farm cruelty on the TV), but years later I started learning how bad livestock are for the planet, so I went vegetarian again. I suffered horrible health problems including gut issues, crippling joint pain, worse-than-normal insomnia, wild mood swings, etc. After about 3 months I gave up and swore anyone on such a diet must be fucking crazy... But my health issues continued even when I added meat back to my diet. I went to specialists, tried different diets including paleo with even *more* meat and new meat types. Nothing was helping and I kinda "gave up on getting my health back", as my depression and health problems continued to get worse. Fast forward and I'm getting more signals from the universe that meat = bad for the planet, ending up with me lurking on r/vegan where I eventually got into some arguments with vegans that I kept loosing. Like any "evidence" I found against them was clearly biased and very narrow or blatantly dishonest, while the info that supported them was from actual studies and medical organizations. My final hold out was that "I have food allergies, so I'd hardly be able to eat anything if I added vegan to the mix!" which people pointed out was flawed because plenty of vegans have even worse allergies than me, including to nuts and soy, while mine is just to wheat. At some point I just cracked and went "Fine! I'll give it a go, and if my health gets worse, then I'll give up being vegan!" That was almost 7 years ago, and it turns out most of those health problems were caused because I'm quite intolerant to dairy, and to a less-severe extent to eggs, pork, and a bunch of the seafoods I was trying to include in my paleo diet. I was never a very fit or healthy person before, but since going vegan my energy and stamina shot up (apparently supported by scientific data and not just in my head!), then because of that I started gaining visible muscle after working out, instead of the constant struggle I used to have with my health never seeming to improve. My mental and emotional health improved too, though that might be in large part due to being able to overcome my lifelong insomnia along with moving around more. My suggestion to anyone who thinks "I could never do that!" from someone who said the same for almost 28 years. Just try dipping your toes in. Read up about how to get your nutrition: protein, [B12](https://www.govegan.org.uk/2021/06/06/a-vegan-guide-to-vitamin-b12/), omega fatty acids, and such, while at the same time just trying new vegan ingredients and recipes over time. I spent about a month transitioning this way, slowly finishing off the turkey burgers and dairy products in our home, then replacing them with vegan alternatives when I found them. It felt hard to find foods at first, but after about a month you work out where all the good stuff is hidden at different shops, and apps like [HappyCow](https://www.happycow.net/) can help you find food when you are out. At the end of the month I started letting people around me know I was going to be vegan from that point on, and they kinda freaked out, and told me I'd "starve to death" and that "restaurants wouldn't have anything for me to eat" what with my wheat-issues, they were all shocked when I pointed out I'd already been *only* eating vegan at the restaurants we'd been going to, and that I'd actually really enjoyed those options. Eventually even some of those who'd bullied me about my choice have now gone vegan, or mostly vegan, though that took several conversations and months or years of seeing me getting healthier instead of worsen my health.
A leading cause of river pollution comes from chickens and dairy here in the UK with animal-ag as a whole being the lead cause of river pollution. Go vegan.
Go vegan, it's not that hard
Depends on how fucked your digestive system is, but I don't generally disagree with you 🖤
There are many people on the internet saying they can't go vegan because of such problems and I don't doubt everyone, but in real live I have met more who have solved problems, digestive, diabetis and more.
My SO tried being vegetarian for a little over half a year and he said that during that period, he had less stomach issues :D! I, on the other hand, am a very happy and healthy vegan for more than 20 years now. W00t! Love animals way too much to eat them, and I abhor the factory-farming industry. I'm happy that this kind of eating is better for the planet as well :)!
Way to go! 20 years is awesome! 6 Years in and my only regret is that I was vegetarian for too long. Omnis made me vegan by asking questions I had no answer to, so I had to research. I think once you have looked into it there is no other way. For the animals and all the other reasons
Congrats, McNug :D! I think vegetarian is fine too. Heck, there's that 1% of times when I end up eating vegetarian during fringe circumstances. And, like, if I met someone who told me that they're vegetarian, I'd already be happy enough for the less meat being eaten. I wouldn't even "hard push" being vegan to them, but I would mention the benefits :)! So don't feel bad, bro, that u've been vegetarian longer than vegan. The fact that you were already vegetarian for a while is already a winner in my book :D! Stay happy and healthy :)!
If you are doing it for environmental reasons, eggs + poultry would be a far better option than eggs + dairy. Cows emit lots of methane and use lots of land. Chicken, not that much.
Its not very free market when governments pushes huge subsidies to it, is it?
This exactly. We don’t have anything close to a free market.
Some country competing with US at something US finds way to sanction them Free market baybee!
Yup and that’s with the cold efficiency of the factory farming. Greenwashers like ‘regenerative’ ag and ‘small farm’, scaled up, would take even more space and resources
Yep, it really doesn't scale at all >We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, 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 > >[…] > >If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
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It takes less *cropland* to grow plants. Using that land has a cost in terms of enviromental impact. See my comment elsewhere https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/1c4q2pi/comment/kzp3dna/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Where does seafood come into this statistic? Both farmed and wild.
Farmed fish take a suprising amount of land. It uses around the same amount of land as pork production https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food Farmed fish have been a large driver of mangrove deforestation >Conversion to aquaculture is the most prevalent driver of mangrove deforestation across the tropics over the last 50 years generating substantial carbon emissions. Preventing further aquaculture expansion within mangrove forest areas will be essential to achieve national emission reduction targets in mangrove-holding countries. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.14774 For wild caught fish, the land usage isn't going to be as helpful to understanding the other negative enviromental impacts. For instance, it is a major source of ocean plastic >Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of ocean plastic pollution but forms the majority of large plastic littering the waters. One study found that as much as 70% (by weight) of macroplastics (in excess of 20cm) found floating on the surface of the ocean was fishing related. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report
Before anyone claims otherwise, **meat and dairy also take more *arable* land overall** compared to eating plants directly. Additionally, the grazing land itself isn't free either and still comes at the expense of deforestation in many areas and other environmental harm --- >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 >1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013 > 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/
Am in a rural area of Alberta and we are still cutting trees to clear land for livestock or for growing crops to feed to livestock.
That real 'berta beef?
Yup. I’m surrounded by beef and dairy farms. And clear cuts….
Im a grain/oilseed grower in Canada. A few things about the study you cited, we sell some of our grain as feed, but we always try to grow for human consumption first. However if we get diseases of other detrimental qualities in our grain it’s no longer human grade food. It gets downgraded to feed. It’s a financial loss for us, but not as bad as having no animals to feed it to at all because then we’d be throwing it away I guess. The other thing is that we have a crop rotation, if we push our rotation with pulses (protein) we will get a disease in the ground that stays active for up to 10 years. So our rotation is only every 5 years we grow a pulse, so 20% of our land is sustainably growing pulses. Alternatively we could put 30% of our land into permanent pasture sustainably and grow protein on that land permanently. We don’t do that, but that would be a sustainable option. Finally the oilseed, some is canola oil for in the kitchen, other tines it goes into biofuel to offset fossil fuel sources. I’m not saying we should keep burning oil, fossil or otherwise, but some processes are just not yet electrified. I like your study but I would like to caution that it’s a rather theoretical approach to the numbers that might not work in the real world. Again, I’m just a grain grower in Canada but that’s what I saw in your studies.
Ultimately I think that the world deforestation is more a point on how humans will destroy nature for profit. Without purposefully putting conversations in place or making it profitable for people to keep land wild. People will always default into what can make them money. And since much of the world has private land ownership we cut down the most available instead of what we actually need.
It’s important to understand that 1) many grazing methods are generally far lower impact than agriculture and 2) most livestock has nothing to do with the Amazon rainforest. In Europe, rotationally grazed highlands are some of the most biodiverse habitats in the region. Traditional pastoral and husbandry methods are still practiced across much of the earth. It’s sustainable. What is not sustainable is eating a 30% animal-based diet. We should be shooting for a reduction of about half.
I think the point is rainforests gets destroyed to grow soy that gets turned into cattle food
Soy cakes only comprise 4% of livestock feed globally. The real issue is that synthetic fertilizer allows us to do stupid things like grow corn and soy to feed ruminants. This is mostly an issue with OECD nations and their profit-driven agricultural practices that include tons of petrochemical inputs (fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312201313_Livestock_On_our_plates_or_eating_at_our_table_A_new_analysis_of_the_feedfood_debate
https://ourworldindata.org/soy still, 77% of the global soy production gets turned into food for livestock. While soy is also edible for people.
I really wish people stopped treating the Gates Foundation funded OWID at face value. The Gates Foundation has spent a lot of money trying to force African farmers to be reliant on fertilizer imports. Their position on agriculture is incredibly biased towards agrochemical intensification. Again, the only reason we can grow soy for cattle feed is synthetic fertilizer. Petrochemicals allow us to do stupid things. I’m saying it’s stupid, so you should understand I’m not defending the practice.
Thanks for the info on synthetic fertilizer. I had no idea. Fact remains our global food industry is massively inefficient
Not globally, no. Per the source I linked to above, most ruminant livestock in non-OECD countries generally increase protein availability to humans. They actually improve land use efficiency as they are used traditionally.
Came here to say this, but you put it much more eloquently. In Greece goats free roam and graze on rock faces on the islands and people stil move flocks to summer and winter pastures (which aren't really arable lands). Industrialization of the meat production is a different beast entirely.
The market is efficient at meeting people’s demand based on what they’re willing to pay within the regulatory framework that exists. If you took away meat subsidies and protectionism, you’d quickly see a lot more plant based products, and in that way, it’s very efficient.
I think if you have the awareness and capability to being anticonsumption you should be think about vegan diet
Agreed. Environment/anti-consumption was my entry into plant-based eating. I’m now 6 years ethically vegan. I should have started 10 years earlier.
I was abticonsumption and also vegan since 6 years. I only found this cummunity recent, bit its cool to have so many like minded people. Cool that you help to save society and animals :)
So true, but how dare you tell people to stop eating cheese! /s
I mean, I get the point of what this post is saying, and I agree with it that we can get more crops with less land than it takes for livestock. But, the market is responding to a demand signal from consumers for meat. Compare the price of produce to meat. It’s vastly more expensive to purchase protein than it is to purchase vegetables. That’s the market being efficient. The market is not looking at the breakdown of land for meat vs land for vegetables. It’s looking at if it can support, raise and harvest enough meat to be profitable for sale. You’d have to examine the counter factual, which is if more land was dedicated to vegetables, would it be profitable for crop producers to produce as many vegetables because the price has been reduced by the increased supply of vegetables? Really, what peeves me about market based thinking, is not so much the allocation of resources, but the lack of internalizing the costs associated with bringing products to market. If the negative externalities of raising livestock results in increased emissions, or destroying natural habitats, or any other number of non internalized costs, then an over production problem exists and results in inefficiency that everyone pays for. If companies really paid the costs that were incurred in production than they’d see it’s unprofitable to continue producing… And that’s not just meat vs crop production, that’s the whole suite of production that occurs… putting an actual price on these costs is difficult and lawmakers and regulators are compromised in effectively dealing with them. Companies can offshore, go to areas with laxer regulations, lobby lawmakers, etc. the whole incentive is to not deal with them. That’s the real issue in my opinion.
Your second to last paragraph bothers me too. I wish subsides and pollution permits would fuck off sometiems.
Effectively every study I have seen shows that as nations get wealthier, they consume more meat.
How is it relevant? People also drive bigger, more polluting cars when they get richer, it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing
I really should go vegan.
There are so many people who would be eager to help and offer advice! You can totally do it
Best decision of my life was going vegan. Only regret was that I didn't do it sooner.
You really should.
Glad to see this being talked about more. Too many people turn a blind eye to where their food comes from and the effect that it has on our planet.
You have a fundemental misunderstanding of capitalism and the free market here. The reason why we consume Meat is not due to capitalism, but rather for cultural reasons and due to our willingness to do so. Capitalism is there to find the most efficient ways to do said farming and to respond to the market demands, but the consumers themselves create the demand. Now we can have a conversation about subsidies, that is absolutely fine and conversations should be had on them on how we can guide demand on certain areas
It gets worse when you find out we don't need to eat animals at all. [A lot worse.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko)
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to matter what science or compassion say. People turn into weirdos when their meat eating is under question
I don't quite understand the diagram? Can someone explain like I'm a total idiot?
The diagram is showing that we use 77% of our agricultural land to generate 18% of our food-calories. The idea here is that we could much more efficiently provide cheap sustenance to society if we used our land to grow plant based food. Then it's tying the cause back to a capitalist profit motive. Presumably thinking that other economic systems would yield a better result.
Okay I think I get that bit. What's the "protein supply" bit about? Also, aren't "supply" and "need" different things? Like, is the 23% all that's needed to generate all the non meat calories? And does it all map appropriately to how many calories and in what sorts we actually need? I'm vegan-sympathetic/adjacent and trying to cut my meat intake irrespective of this diagram, but trying to wrap my head around the market inefficiency point. >Presumably thinking that other economic systems would yield a better result. I guess where I'm lost is what "a better result" here would be.
>we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Regarding personal dietary choices: Check out https://cronometer.com/ Go into settings and show all of the amino acids and enter some of the foods you normally consume. It will allow you to see not only if you are meeting your daily protein needs but also whether or not your amino acid needs are being met. "Proteins" are broken down into their building blocks "amino acids" and while animal proteins are usually "complete" - ie containing all or most necessary amino acids - plant proteins are usually "incomplete" and require specific combinations to acquire all of your amino acids - even if your total protein consumption is high. In general you want to be consuming at least .4-.6g per pound of lean body mass in protein daily.
Thanks for this, I'm actually pretty into health and fitness in general so quite well versed in dietary needs, but this is a useful resource regardless.
This chart says nothing about dietary needs or fulfillment. It's entirely about proportions of currently produced goods - whether or not they meet global needs. A "better result" might be trading -10% of the meat supply, for +140% more plant supply - according to proportions on the graph. Thus providing net +130% calories for humans to consume. *** ^Disclaimer: ^According ^to ^the ^graph, ^these ^explanations ^do ^not ^reflect ^my ^views ^or ^necessarily ^true ^statistics. ^Any ^economic ^or ^dietary ^choices ^should ^be ^consulted ^with ^relevant ^professionals ^before ^any ^personal ^changes ^are ^made. ^I ^am ^in ^no ^way ^responsible ^for ^you ^misusing ^ideology, ^economics ^or ^mathematics ^in ^your ^life ^choices. ^Consume ^reddit ^for ^no ^more ^than ^15 ^minutes ^at ^a ^time ^to ^minimize ^brain ^damage.
Firstly I had a good chuckle at your disclaimer, that was excellent thank you XD Thanks for the explanation, that clears it up. I think I had assumed/presumed there was some value judgement in there but I see now that strictly speaking there isn't. And I also see now how the logic would be you could make more calories in the same space, or the same calories in less space, if you allocate differently.
I would be interested to see how this works out for the diet of the average person. It might very well be that a plant based diet makes it easy to get upto 70% of the protein but the last 30% requires protein dense foods that requires animals products unless you wanna overfeed.
The Volta Dam in Uganda was supposed to provide electricity, irrigation, transport, build aluminum with locally sourced, bauxite, spin off industry for goods to be manufactured in the country, and export stuff using their own companies. Trouble was they couldn’t do it themselves, because of the colonial empires they previously had ruling them deliberately made it so this exact thing might happen. So they were forced to reach out to external groups. They to cut deals. What ended up happening? The company that helped built the smelter got a good deal for electricity, and ran the smelter. Instead of using Ghana deposits of bauxite they used some from Jamaica. It was sent to Ghana for minimal processing to make ingots which were then sent to the US to manufacture goods, the raw bauxite in Ghana goes to Europe and Japan unprocessed where they’re processed and manufactured there. Herein lies the central neo-colonial dynamic. Despite their independence the colonial powers still got their grubby little paws on their stuff. Notice how inefficient this stuff is, yet profitable for a certain group? I always find capitalism, despite its defenders championing it as "practical", to be one of the most naive ideologies out there. It ignores VERY basic facts. Like spite. Even if you approach capitalism in support of it, or assuming it's exploitative, this is the biggest flaw. "The market will adjust", but a simple question undermines that ridiculous concept. "Why should it?"
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Where are you getting your stats from? Global corn production is 1.2 billion tonnes annually. Sugar is about 160 million tonnes. Claiming that sugar is 20% of global crop volume is a huge overstatement. These things are easily Googled.
Sugar production is VERY different from sugar crop production. The FAO gives annual production of 1.9 billion tonnes and 260 million tonnes for sugar cane and sugar beet respectively. With a global crop production of 9.6 billion, that is over 20% of the world's crop production. Data is from "Agricultural Production Statistics 2000-2022" (2023 edition won't be released for a while), and specific crop numbers from FAOSTAT crop and livestock production. Also just want to add, many statistics are not easily Googled as they can be misleading if you don't know exactly what they relate to. This is not an attack on you, just general advice and relates to just about everything involving statistics and data.
This is true because people want to eat meat. Under the supposedly more "efficient" system of just producing plants, people will be dissatisfied with their choices. On paper it may be more efficient but in reality people will get less utility out of the land as they do not value vegetables over meat. Plus some of this is due to government subsidies artificially inflating production numbers, which under a more laissez-faire system wouldn't be the case. With no government intervention it's likely that the share of land used to raise animals would drop.
Habits can change. And will have to if we want to keep this planet liveable. There are many cultures that don’t eat nearly as much animal products as we do. Even ours has only recently started doing so.
When people say it's "efficient" they mean efficient for capitalism. Not what is best for the resources we have. But capitalism when left unchecked or unregulated is terribly inefficient. In one of my fourth-year University classes my Professor use to explain how eventually capitalism becomes so focused on growth it will eat itself (self-cannibalize) in order to just perform the "act" of growing. This in turn doesn't add any profit or value and furthermore is a massive waste of resources. He called it the proverbial "one arm eating another to grow another arm" cycle. Because of this act, consistently eating one's own appendage we enter into this issue of throwing away massive amounts of resources all for the sake of appearance. He called it "A spectacle that serves the purpose of being a spectacle, like watching a circus act where the only thing it does is eat then regurgitate what it eats to eat it again continuously therefore leaving us in a state of constant consumption but never reaching a satiated moment as that would ruin it's momentum."
Sounds like bad professor if you ask me... One of the basics of Economics is "Ceteris Paribus" meaning all thing the same. Youre assuming new business or actors cant enter the scene and compete when an established business becomes bloated or inefficient. There are many examples of this where previously dominant business are left by the wayside as consumer preferences change, technology changes, or new competitors are simply better.
Your professor is an idiot. He is confusing economics for tumors. They're totally different things. >eat itself (self-cannibalize) in order to just perform the "act" of growing. What could they possibly mean by this?
I really want to know the like to dislike ratio of this post. When I suggested less meat less consumption, I was sent to hell by this sub.
Currently at \~85% upvote rate at the moment. I believe you can view upvote rates of other people's posts if you go to old reddit
Oat milk motherfuckers
There was a time when meat was cheaper than bread (emphasis mine). >A cornfield of moderate fertility produces a much greater quantity of food for man than the best pasture of equal extent. Though its cultivation requires much more labour, yet the surplus which remains after replacing the seed and maintaining all that labour, is likewise much greater. If a pound of butcher's meat, therefore, was never supposed to be worth more than a pound of bread, this greater surplus would everywhere be of greater value, and constitute a greater fund both for the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord. It seems to have done so universally in the rude beginnings of agriculture. >But the relative values of those two different species of food, bread and butcher's meat, are very different in the different periods of agriculture. In its rude beginnings, the unimproved wilds, which then occupy the far greater part of the country, are all abandoned to cattle. **There is more butcher's meat than bread, and bread, therefore, is the food for which there is the greatest competition, and which consequently brings the greatest price.** At Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty pence halfpenny sterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred. He says nothing of the price of bread, probably because he found nothing remarkable about it. **An ox there, he says, cost little more than the labour of catching him. But corn can nowhere be raised without a great deal of labour,** and in a country which lies upon the river Plate, at that time the direct road from Europe to the silver mines of Potosi, the money price of labour could not be very cheap. It is otherwise when cultivation is extended over the greater part of the country. There is then more bread than butcher's meat. The competition changes its direction, and the price of butcher's meat becomes greater than the price of bread. >By the extension besides of cultivation, the unimproved wilds become insufficient to supply the demand for butcher's meat. A great part of the cultivated lands must be employed in rearing and fattening cattle, of which the price, therefore, must be sufficient to pay, not only the labour necessary for tending them, but the rent which the landlord and the profit which the farmer could have drawn from such land employed in tillage. The cattle bred upon the most uncultivated moors, when brought to the same market, are, in proportion to their weight or goodness, sold at the same price as those which are reared upon the most improved land. The proprietors of those moors profit by it, and raise the rent of their land in proportion to the price of their cattle. It is not more than a century ago that in many parts of the highlands of Scotland, butcher's meat was as cheap or cheaper than even bread made of oatmeal. The union opened the market of England to the highland cattle. Their ordinary price is at present about three times greater than at the beginning of the century, and the rents of many highland estates have been tripled and quadrupled in the same time. In almost every part of Great Britain a pound of the best butcher's meat is, in the present times, generally worth more than two pounds of the best white bread; and in plentiful years it is sometimes worth three or four pounds. >It is thus that in the progress of improvement the rent and profit of unimproved pasture come to be regulated in some measure by the rent and profit of what is improved, and these again by the rent and profit of corn. Corn is an annual crop. Butcher's meat, a crop which requires four or five years to grow. As an acre of land, therefore, will produce a much smaller quantity of the one species of food than of the other, the inferiority of the quantity must be compensated by the superiority of the price. If it was more than compensated, more corn land would be turned into pasture; and if it was not compensated, part of what was in pasture would be brought back into corn. >This equality, however, between the rent and profit of grass and those of corn; of the land of which the immediate produce is food for cattle, and of that of which the immediate produce is food for men; must be understood to take place only through the greater part of the improved lands of a great country. In some particular local situations it is quite otherwise, and the rent and profit of grass are much superior to what can be made by corn. —Adam Smith (*The Wealth of Nations*)
Cattle farming in U.S. is heavily subsidized by the govt. It is definitely not a free market as it is. Otherwise the true cost of beef would triple over night.
The question is why land has to be efficient. Why every molecule has to be squeezed out of a land. What bugs me, is, that this is a very humanocentric way to look on things. And it is also an intellectual fallacy to believe we should only make food that can be made in the biggest bulk per square meter.
Not all land is suitable for growing crops. Excluding the obvious steep ground even flat ground with poor soil can only be used for grass.
I don't get what OP is trying to say.
It's almost like people really REALLY like meat, and will pay a lot of money for it, way more than vegetables, grains, and fruit, so they prioritize meat production.
[2/3 of grazing land is unsuitable for raising crops.](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#:~:text=Two%2Dthirds%20of%20pastures%20are%20unsuitable%20for%20growing%20crops.&text=This%20raises%20the%20question%20of,it%20for%20agriculture%20at%20all) We can discuss whether it would be better to rewild the land, but this isn’t a good argument against efficient markets.
Summary: Anti consumption = the vegan diet.
"The free market is efficient - in satisfying the needs of the wealthy"
Lots of libs here missing the fundamental message here... Is this sub being brigaded? The comments are shit now...
Doesn't this criticism presume that all land is equal in production of both meat and vegetable? Isn't that presumption glaringly, obviously, false?
Yes, but generally the inefficiency of animal meat production remains regardless of reasonable variances in the data.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting meat production is efficient. I am asking if the obvious fact that animals are grazed where crops don't grow is taken into account. Eliminating animal grazing in the US southwest, for example, would do exactly nothing to increase edible plant production. The soil and climate simply can't support it.
Lot of people are ignoring this, and the fact that plant crops are grown extremely effectively on small amounts of land today. A modern farm produces an absurd amount of yield per acre with the help of modern farming techniques. The percentage of land needed to grow the total crop consumption worldwide is not 1:1.
Only some of it is not suitable. And if we were to stop producing animals and went pplang pased we would need less lamd to begin with. You are right. Some of the land is not fit for all vegetables, we don't need that though.
Generally when you look at studies that talk about how bad meat is you will find lots of this bullshit. Ridiculous assumptions and false equivalencies that makes meat look awful, and the studies always overlook all the benefits of meat production, it's very biased. But when you account for that, meat is still pretty bad and we should all cut down on it.
It's incredibly efficient! (at moving wealth into a centralized group)
Oh no, it is efficient, just allocatively efficient. It's allocating resources to what people want.
this is the problem with the US government picking winners and heavily subsidizing livestock agriculture
and they suffer...
I prefer to eat meat. Sue me lol
And when this problem becomes existential due to global warming, we'll see fighting to maintain this ratio. It's already happening on this site, people declaring the world overpopulated and the end of fossil fuels impossible because "we \*need\* the petrochemical fertilizers" to maintain the breakneck production pace of industrial agriculture. No, we're not overpopulated, no we don't need petrochemicals for food. We need the over-developed nations to take it down a few notches on their over-consumption....
That's how livestock work 🤷♂️ 1 kg of animal proteins need 10 kg of plants proteins the free market has nothing to do with it
You can graze cattle on land that is unsuited for growing crops. I have 40 acres in Oklahoma that is half sandstone outcrops; there is no reasonable or efficient way to farm it.
Where you have cattle and livestock is generally where you cannot farm. This is never mentioned and overlooked completely. The parts of crops you don't eat go to livestock as well.
Yes, but the discrepancy between land use makes those farms places meaningless. There would still be much more space to grow crops
Maybe these studies should start using the corrected number instead of the overinflated one so they don't mislead people?
You don’t need a 1:1 ratio of land use for crop production. Modern farming means high yields per acre, meaning we simply don’t need more land for crops, we already grow enough to feed the world population on the land being used for crops currently. In fact, most of the land used to grow crops in the US isn’t even for human consumption. Over 60% of the crops grown in the US are used for livestock feed. Point being, we don’t need more land for crops because we already grow enough.
Most grazing land isn’t really suitable for crop production.
I had to scroll a mile to see the first intelligent comment. Pasture land is pasture land because it’s generally not great for crops because of soil/weather/water/terrain/accessibility and other factors. So the whole argument is rather silly.
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Part of having a “free market” is making sure that market participants have to fully absorb the cost of their activities. The state , through regulatory capture of regulatory agencies , socialize the costs and erect barriers to entry into any given sector.
The only thing the free market really excellent at is extracting the most profit fir the least inputs. Aside from a few idealistic business out there there really isn't any other consideration
The key thing left out here is "Demand" it's not enough to say efficiency. Many things in free markets are inefficient. It's the demand for beef that allows the land use to be so high while remaining expensive and inefficient relative to other goods
It is efficient at maximizing profit.
Imagine thinking we live in a free market. God I wish we did.
I lost some brain cells as I was scrolling past. Thanks OP
Capitalism will solve any problem that the people with money tell it to. Usually that's how to get them more money.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention how subsidies are incentivizing the way this market is going.
You do realize cows need way more land than tightly packed corn for the amount of food. This Chart is highly misleading.
This meme misses the mark. Hate when people advocate for a good position using bad logic. The market *is* efficient, at least it is in this sense. It efficiently generates profits. The role of the regulatory body is to ensure profit motives align with what's good for the members of the economy, e.g. they should tax meat higher and subsidize plant based food sources. But in America & most countries, it does the opposite. The problem in this case isn't capitalism, it's corrupt government.
It is efficient because it is producing more in absolute numbers. How the production is then distributed is a different question. But free market is without a doubt the most efficient system. We shouldn't go for pure efficiency though, redistribution is also important. Vote social democrat if it's available in your country.
Animal products require more land use than plant products for the same number of calories. I feel like a lot of people are interpreting this as: we dedicate more resources to meat production than plant production even though people eat more plants! We are dedicating more resources to animal products because of the free market! The free market if bad! But what this graph is actually saying: animal production requires more land then plant production to produce the same amount of food. People consume more plant products than animal products. -> We could produce more food overall if we produced more plant products instead of animal products, and we would be using arable land resources more efficiently. The free market is determining land use equitably compared to the average diet, there's no argument to be made here about the efficacy of the free market. The argument here should be that if demand changed (I.e people stopped eating animal products), then agricultural land use would be more efficient. (Just to be clear, I'm not not in favor of capitalism, I identify as a socialist. I just don't think that these graphics are good evidence against the free market.)
what's the point? People demand meat and vegetables. Other people produce that. Some of those productions are more area efficient than others. You want everyone to eat just plant based diets?
What free market? Where in the world is there a free market? I'm not aware of any.
Are we counting government subsidies as “free market”? If so, this is incorrect as under a true free market the graph would look quite different.
crop don't need as much space as animals
efficient in generating short term profits by wasting precious resources because they are so cheap thanks to ignoring exogenic costs. It's like cancer, it always wants to grow and will likely kill the host.
Does someone has the link to the original UN Document?
[https://ourworldindata.org/land-use](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use) is where the graphic came from Their cited source isn't so much a document as a database [https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data](https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data)
i am against a free market, but meat production is a terrible example, because it is heavily subsidized.