this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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You are spreading misinformation. Veganism requires vastly less land and water resources. Type “land use food calculator” into google
None of what I said was misinformation. Turning everyone vegan doesn’t resolve factory farming crops. Chemicals to ensure we can actually grow food, monocultures that are terrible for the environment, limitations of where things can grow.
I’m all for reducing meat consumption, but the utopian world where everyone is vegan has many hurdles to overcome that aren’t just magically resolved. Sure, right now we might be able to reduce land usage for farming, but that is one small aspect of commercial farming under capitalism.
How do people afford food when they don’t live in a place that can grow it? How do we ensure we can continue to grow food when we are so dependent on chemicals to do so? How does a developing country support agriculture without the huge subsidies currently required in developed nations? How do you educate 8 billion people on how to properly get the nutrients they need from new sources of food? How do convince society that GMOs aren’t bad?
These are rhetorical, but moving to veganism requires us to think about these types of things before claiming “but less farm land”
They didnt say everyone needed to be vegan, just that being vegan become the norm. There will always be edge cases, and people can do whatever they want in the wild of course.
We can push forward and try to figure out how to slaughter even more despite all the problems that are coming with increased line speeds, or we can choose a different direction and tackle those problems.
Noone said the solution was perfect, just better. Are you afraid of improving yourself?
Almost all of those are just straight up the same problems that already exist in the current system though?
And do you have plans to resolve them? I didn’t just make that all up to make veganism sound bad. They are realities that need to be dealt with if we made the ethical decision to not consume animal products anymore. With 80% of the grocery store, currently, relying on animal products, how do we replace them? With agriculture. Those problems now only don’t go away, they get exacerbated. Not to mention all of the pollinator populations dwindling.
I don’t have the solutions, I’m just some fucking guy. But if we don’t want more and more people suffering while reducing or removing animal products from our diets, we would have to take many steps before doing so.
And the person who posted this meme is called “MilitantVegan” and straight up doesn’t seem to understand human evolution or science. I’ve only said things that are true, or what my opinion is based on that truth. It might not be great, it might not be true in 50 years, but just watch a documentary on modern agriculture and you will see that these things are our reality. We farm the soil until it becomes barren, and fix it with pesticides and fertilizers for the sake of commercialization. We can’t keep cutting down natural habitats in the search of usable soil to replace those things without completely ruining the lives of animals…the goal of reducing or eliminating the use of animal products.
Ftfy
It's kind of just whataboutism. I don't really have a horse in this race, but I find it somewhat unlikely that most reasonable people are suggesting every human immediately stop eating animal products forever. A transition to a world where people eat less of them doesn't need us to figure out how to feed the people of Longyearbyen right now.
Except people who can eat animals can live off fishing and hunting, in places where they can’t grow food.
Also, I think he was making some point about food staying cheap enough so people can buy it even if they don’t produce it, but I’m not sure what factor is being expected to make food more expensive.
Wanna know the most abundant chemical that helps plants grow?
Carbon dioxide.
I’m not sure if you just aren't aware or are being intentionally obtuse, but that isn’t what keeps the soil healthy or enables plants to grow. Have you grown plants ever?
Sure, photosynthesis takes in CO2 and sunlight and converts that into sugars, but plants need much more than that from the soil and water, which we have to add using modern agriculture.
Growing food on the scale to feed our population now requires crop rotations, fallow fields, nitrogen, phosphates, potash, insecticides, and billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. You can grow a field of crops once or twice before adding all of the fertilizers and pesticides, but any amount of regular farming requires much much much more than CO2.
I’m familiar with agriculture, having gone to school, read books, and grown plants.
It seems that you are the one being intentionally obtuse. You and I both know that carbon dioxide is kept elevated in greenhouses on purpose because doing so increases the yield of plants grown in those greenhouses.
Yes, other chemicals are necessary to build a plant. The most abundant one however is carbon dioxide. It’s where like 99% of the plant’s mass comes from. And the levels of carbon dioxide in the air change the rate of plant growth.
Nitrogen is also a big limiting factor, but fortunately we’ve found out how to extract nitrogen from the air efficiently using methane, so we can have enough nitrogen fertilizer to feed everyone.
This too can cause misinformation.
Supporting a vegetarian diet requires less land and water resources.
Veganism requires the overuse of pesticides to the point that it makes the soil become unusable faster and hence needs higher treatment upkeep, essentially causing faster consumption of the limited energy resources we have.
You were correct until here, but the land use food calculator will actually only be giving information pertaining to a normal (non-vegan) crop.
What do pesticides have to do with veganism?
Sounds like the problem is with pesticides.
What you are missing here is that we wouldn’t need to grow more food than we do now, we would need to grow less. Whatever issue you can point at for growing enough plants to feed the world, we’re already dealing with now. We already grow enough plant based calories to feed the world over, we just feed it to cows and other livestock. We would need to use less pesticides (not to mention antibiotics) even if everyone was vegan.
You are also narrowing in on obscure edge cases. As others have pointed out not all problems need to be solved and not all people need to adopt a vegan diet for us to make progress towards sustainability. It would be like worrying about the grid and battery technology and strip mining required to create solar panels etc. in the transition to renewable energy. worthy causes for sure but not justification to keep using fossil fuels.
And people don’t even have to change their moral judgment in the case of doing it for climate reasons. They are free to keep believing however they do. Though I suspect that once people stop eating meat for pragmatic reasons the motivated reasoning behind their moral judgment will collapse.
What I am putting up there, is that, stopping meat is not the problem.
The problem arises with using the veganism buzzword, which will make people think that paying those who advertise vegan stuff would make anything better.
It would most definitely make it worse than whole vegetarian (which includes putting up with the insects and worms that come during farming) and might even end up being as much of a burden as the meat industry.
People will think they are doing better, while not actually doing better, which is worse than the status quo.
What makes you think that? Why would growing grain for humans require more pesticides than growing grain for animals, for example?
Growing grain for the vegan brand will require more pesticides. It's as if noone is really reading.
You’re entirely wrong.
No, that's a myth. Growing meat is a lot more efficient.
Do you have a source on that?
We have plenty of countries like New Zealand and Scotland which barely have any arable land and yet animal farming is allowing them to sustain much bigger populations than they could otherwise and even export meat elsewhere.
You're leaving out that they import a lot of produce and non-meat foods.
Literally impossible, due to energy/biomass transfer up the food chain. The bottom will always be the most efficient.
Picture illustrating this
Except that you can't eat grass.
Most meat eaters are not eating meat that feed on grass. Mostly it’s corn and wheat which humans can eat. If we even made the simple change that banned meat consumption of non grass fed cows that would mitigate 90% of the issue. Also beef will cost like $100 a pound, so
What do you mean most? There's no corn/wheat fed meat in Europe. And pretty much anywhere else except for US. Growing special food for animals when you have shitloads of free grass is dumb.
The use of corn-based feed for animals seems to be a universal trend. In Europe it's done less than in the US, but it's an option everywhere and driven by prices. And those prices do not consider the CO2 cost to the ecosystem.
https://www.dairyherd.com/news/european-cows-eat-more-foreign-corn-global-glut-erodes-price