Why Vegetarianism will not save the world

Asguard,

You own the book, don't you?

Why don't you quote me the part that says "We at the CSIRO considered vegetarian diets vs meat diets and we have concluded that a meat diet is best..."

or something along those lines?

What?

YOU were the one who started going on about your favorite CSIRO diet. Then YOU mentioned the Heart Foundation and the NHMRC.

So, if anybody has dragged in these organisations, it's you.

Call away.

What has happened here is that you started by going off on a thread tangent about your favorite diet. Then, when I simply pointed out that the diet is a diet for meat eaters - an obvious truth - you got all hot and flustered. The rest has been you blustering and blathering about my supposed lies, hypocrisy and illogicality. And now, since you can't produce the goods to prove me wrong or catch me in a lie, you want me banned?

 

It's ridiculous to feed ruminants protein. The whole point is that a ruminant is a cellulose-to-protein conversion engine. They have a bacterial culture in that gigantic gut that digests the cellulose and turns it into more bacteria, and then the cattle digest the bacteria.

In the USA we used to feed cattle alfalfa, which is a bloody legume! As if feeding them high-protein cereal wasn't enough, then they started eating high-protein beans! At one time they even got fish meal.

We'll just convert to hydroponics. More efficient, smaller footprint.

More than that. The efficiency ratio of agriculture (farming and animal husbandry) to hunting and gathering is much higher than 6:1. I can't find any reference, but I seem to recall an article many years ago hypothesizing that an eternally Paleolithic human population couldn't grow much beyond 100 million. So it would kill off more like 99% of us.

Nonetheless, regardless of how you feed them, domestic cattle are an environmental nightmare. Whether you grow grain and feed it to them or simply let them graze, they need a much larger area of feed-growing land per pound of meat than any other common food animal. As I mentioned before, simply switching from beef farming to dairy farming increases the efficiency of the food cycle by a factor of ten.

It turns out that the best contraceptive is prosperity. Even in the Third World, as their per capita GDP rises from starvation to mere poverty, where people used to have 12 children they now have only 8. The population is almost universally predicted to stall just barely into eleven digits near the end of this century, and then start dropping. The turning point was in the early 1980s, when the second derivative of population went negative and stayed there.

Ironic, isn't it? One of the primary advantages of having a formal government with continuity is supposed to be that it will adopt a long-term perspective and worry about our great-great grandchildren, not just the people who are alive, voting and paying taxes today.

Why is it that people like my wife and me, who have no children, often feel that we care more about the future than our friends and neighbors with children?

Indeed. Let's hope that civilization keeps advancing.

 

No it doesn't, I have already clarified on what grounds I think they are equivalent, in this thread no less.

For example, not all Beef and Sheep farming takes place in areas that need to be clear felled first.
Not all sheep and beef farming requires grain to be successful.
Not all sheep and beef farming occurs in areas that can actually be used for anything else, for example, sheep farming can be carried out in areas that would require irrigation to grow anything useful.
Ploughing a field, then spreading superphosphates to it looses more nutrients to water than grazing it with cattle or sheep - even if superphosphate is required.
Diffuse pollution from effluent runoff can be mitigated or prevented with proper riparian management.

As I have said, a well managed sheep and beef farm does not neccessarily have to be any more damaging to the environment then a corn farm. Tell me, do you know what the prime cause of the expansion of the Gulf dead zone is? Yes, I know it's a natural phenomenom, however there is something that humans are doing that means that it is getting worse.

It has something to do with all that Corn and Maize farming in the mississippi catchment.

The only person bullshitting here is you.

If you had, you would understand what my point is.

The problem is that you're not addressing the statements that I have actually made, and technically, that is called bullshit.

You have yet to address any of my actual statements.

Take this statement of yours, for example:

Made in response to this comment:

Nothing in that statement implies that Sheep & Beef farming has zero environmental impact. Not by any remotely reasonable interpretation.

The only thing that that statement says is that comments about the amount of water consumed growing grain for cattle, and the amount of land being cleared to grow grain for cattle, and the amount of grain consumed by cattle, and how much less protein per kg beef cattle have then the grain they consume, are only valid if you're talking about grain fed beef, however, not everywhere has access to grain fed beef, and so arguments against grain fed beef, are really only effective as arguments against factory farmed meat, not meat eating in general.

None of which implies that grass fed beef is without impact, or even that grass fed beef has less impact then horticultural farming.

Is that clear enough for you?

 

Seconded. Personally, I think if I found a supermarket that sold grain-fed beef, I might actually consider boycotting it.

I thought this article was interesting: Lab grown sausage six months away.

 

The technology of hydroponics is in its infancy. It barely works, and in its actual commercial applications (cut flowers in Africa and South America, recreational drugs in North America) it's not even true hydroponics. Give it a few more generations and most of the problems you identified will have been overcome.

Of course that is unlikely to happen. The human population is going to peak at about ten billion within two more generations, and then start falling. We can easily continue to feed all those people with the vast expanses of undeveloped land in the still-sparsely populated Western Hemisphere. The only reason people are starving today is that their despotic leaders intercept the gigantic shipments of food our many charitable organizations send them, sell it, and use the money to buy weapons, limousines and villas. If people are still starving in 2085, that will still be the only reason.

So there will be no pressing need to develop the technology of hydroponics.

But there isn't enough of that pasture land, to feed enough livestock, to provide everyone on the planet, with what we Americans consider a minimum daily ration of meat. Enormous tracts of forest are being cleared for grazing cattle. Even if everyone were willing to eat the meat of some less environmentally destructive herbivore, we'd still run out of natural pasture. If I'm not mistaken, even if we stopped eating the meat of cows and chickens and only drank their milk and ate their eggs, which would increase the efficiency of grazing by one thousand percent, there still would not be enough natural pasture to provide milk and eggs to the entire human race. And of course very roughly half of the human race is lactose-intolerant so that wouldn't even work!