this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
326 points (69.9% liked)

memes

10645 readers
2973 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chetradley 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This is an interesting edge case you're presenting, but it's not representative of the overwhelming majority of agricultural land devoted to livestock, and it's been largely solved by modern supply chains and distribution.

[–] Aux 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

That's not an edge case, plenty of countries have little to no arable land. Scotland and Japan have around 10% of arable land, New Zealand has 2%. Growing veggies is a luxury, especially in northern parts of the world.

[–] chetradley 4 points 6 months ago

Yes, but shipping veggies has negligible GHG emissions compared to livestock farming. You're hung up on a small fraction of livestock production when the vast majority is factory farmed.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We are always working at solving problems. Right now the world is trying to figure out how to have its meat and eat it too, and spending all of our energy and money on that.

If we decided the problem was figuring out how to grow plants in those conditions, I bet you'd find we would improve that too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Take a look at a map of Norway. If you find a way of growing crops on rocks that are dozens of kilometres from the nearest road, and covered in snow 8/12 months a year, please let me know.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Well you'd have to make exceptions for those that can't have their food shipped from better climates and also can't grow their own food. I'd imagine those peoples lives wouldn't change much from now were the rest of the world to stop eating meat.

Everyone who has the ability to avoid eating meat, should. Bringing up exceptions doesnt negate that position, its built in.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Which is why I said "in general, you're right". However, that doesn't take away the fact that most livestock from some countries is primarily raised on land that can't be farmed.

Speaking of supply chains: We could do the math on whether shipping a vegetable-based calorie from Brazil to Norway is more or less of an environmental burden than a meat-based calorie produced in Norway.

[–] chetradley 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Did you read the text on that graphic?

... land conversion for grazing and feed ...

I'm not talking about meat production in general (which I think should be minimised), I'm specifically talking about meat production from land that is not viable for other uses.

This was exactly my point: I'm legitimately interested in how that graphic looks if you consider meat produced on land that cannot be used for other types of agriculture, and which is local so that transportation is a negligible cost, and feed production is close to non-existent, because the livestock primarily lives off the land.