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From Phys.org:
Global food consumption and production is seriously unbalanced. In the UK alone we threw away 4.4 million tonnes of "avoidable" food waste in 2015 – that is food that was edible before it was discarded – which equates to £13 billion worth of food wasted, or £470 per household. Meanwhile, nearly 800 million people globally are chronically undernourished.
The world population is projected to grow to 9 billion people by the middle of this century. We face a huge challenge in finding ways to adequately feed this rapidly growing population whilst also protecting the natural environment.
However it is not just the amount of food production and the balance of its distribution that are key concerns for sustainably feeding the planet. We also need to think about what we are eating.
Presently western diets are characterised by a high proportion of animal foodstuffs, and this is a problem not just for our health, but for the environment. The Hunger Project has cited climate change as one of the hidden sources of hunger. In doing so it highlights how food production and the environment are inextricably linked.
Meat and dairy production requires more land, more water and has higher greenhouse gas emissions than plant based alternatives. As the global population continues to grow, we will need to be ever more prudent with the resources that are required for food production. We must consider whether the proportion of resources currently devoted to meat and dairy production is optimal given the numbers needing to be fed and the environmental impacts such diets can cause.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday June 02 2017, @08:00AM (11 children)
Food production is a non-issue. The simple fact of food waste demonstrates: there is more than enough food. Agricultural yields have shot through the roof in the course of the last century.
There are people starving. The reasons for this are manifold: wars driving farmers from their fields. Misguided international aid that puts local farmers out of business. Corrupt governments stealing donated food and selling it rather than giving it to their starving populations. Etc.
Overpopulation is another problem. In primitive cultures, lots of children died. Provide clean water and some degree of medical care, and suddenly most kids survive - while birth control is still an unknown concept. Yet any effort to aggressively push birth control (like offering free implants) is met with the immediate outcry of "eugenics". Which shows an interesting dichotomy of internal attitudes.
Moreover, meat production does not necessarily impact the production of grains and vegetables. A lot of cattle grazing is on non-agricultural land - land often unsuitable for agriculture. Claiming that meat production impacts food supply in general is vegan propaganda.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @09:21AM (8 children)
for growing plants you need both land and water.
example:
you live on a farm in Arizona.
you grow some cabbages in the backyard, and you have a cow that eats grass from everywhere else (I *think* there's grass in Arizona).
you have a limited water supply because it's been ten dry years.
do you give water to your cow, or do you water the cabbages?
please note that I'm not a farmer, so some of the technicalities in my example may be wrong (for instance I'm not sure if it is even possible to grow cabbages in Arizona, other than inside a greenhouse, and I couldn't tell you how much water a cow needs in Arizona, although I assume it's on the order of 20 litres a day or more).
(Score: 3, Funny) by inertnet on Friday June 02 2017, @09:42AM
First you put the cow in the boat and bring it to the other side (don't know if there are boats in Arizona).
Next you bring the cabbage, you bring the cow back on the return trip.
Next you bring the water.
Next you bring the cow.
Problem solved. Please note that I'm not a ferryman.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Friday June 02 2017, @12:26PM (6 children)
you grow some cabbages in the backyard, and you have a cow that eats grass from everywhere else (I *think* there's grass in Arizona).
you have a limited water supply because it's been ten dry years.
do you give water to your cow, or do you water the cabbages?"
Yeah you don't do either of those things on a dry plot in AZ, sorry.
Cattle are mostly kept in areas with naturally abundant water and poor soil. Cabbages require good soil, also need lots of water, and strongly prefer colder climates (a greenhouse can be useful with cabbage, like virtually any plant, to give an early start, but it's actually a horrible place to vegetate cabbage. They like cool weather and they have a strong tendency to develop rot and/or become infested with parasites when grown in tha warm wet.)
Arizona manages some cattle production. ~98% of agricultural land in the state is grazing land good for little else BUT cattle production, in fact. AZ ranks 15 among the states by population, but only 32nd by cattle production. And it does even worse at cabbage.
Anyway the point is you're looking at this from the lens of someone who has no practical experience of it and is purely thinking of it in abstract in the simplest terms. But the details matter. Simply removing cattle does not necessarily free up water or land for other uses, water is not always equivalent to water, land is not always equivalent to land, you can't just shift things around as if these things were identical commodities or numbers in a computer game.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 02 2017, @03:06PM (2 children)
Meat and grazing animals don't necessarily have to mean "cows." Bison do better on the range in the Midwest and West. They're large animals and supply a lot of meat. The meat tastes good. Now you can get it in many places in the West, but it hasn't broken through to general consumption yet such that you can buy it by the pound in most grocery stores.
There have been some recent studies indicating that the prairie fares better with bison than without, too, so perhaps there's even more to the story of what's good for the environment than simply not eating meat.
As for vegetables, you can correct a lot of circumstances of a particular location with a greenhouse.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday June 02 2017, @04:06PM (1 child)
Ground bison is in Cub and Target here in Minneapolis. It's more expensive though, so I only get it as an occasional treat.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 02 2017, @05:03PM
That's awesome. If it's at Target perhaps there's a chance it will show up at Targets elsewhere. I would buy it all the time, since I can't eat beef anymore.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @04:55PM (2 children)
thank you for the clarifications. I can't tell if you agree with the GP though, and I'm curious.
the IPCC says growing cattle for meat is worse for the environment than growing vegetables.
I thought the main two reasons were (1) methane and (2) water consumption.
as you explain, my example is bad because I didn't think of practicalities.
is the IPCC wrong, or is it just my example that's broken?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @11:04PM
The problem is that it is a complicated situation. For example, you can recycle the waste from cows to make things useful, but most figures don't factor that in. In addition, they usually compare feedlot cows on an FC-rich diet, which drastically increases methane production of the cows compared to a grass-based diet, and that is even more over a pasture cow. Plus, various estimates include and exclude various externalities.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday June 03 2017, @01:16AM
Ok look the capital of the EU is Belgium. Small country, very high population density, lots of water, rich soil. They export both pigs and beef, lots of it, and this stuff is probably pretty accurate for them, because the land they have in livestock production could do other things. They subsidize the livestock, because they don't want to be dependent on a foreign supply and find it's all been infected (for example.) If they let go of that safety net and eliminated subsidies, their livestock industry, which has a history stretching back continuously for tens of thousands of years, would essentially die. They'd import beef and pork from other areas that are less able to do other things, and improve their overall efficiency, but even a die-hard libertarian like myself can understand why they might hesitate to do this.
Most countries that are large meat exporters don't really fit that pattern though. Lots of meat is actually coming from areas that can't grow typical food crops.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 02 2017, @01:14PM (1 child)
While I agree that resource estimates required for meat production are often overestimated by "vegan propaganda," it's not reasonable to go the other direction and claim that this is a non-issue. Some cattle grazing may be on "non-agricultural" land, but that doesn't change the fact that a huge percentage of U.S. beef comes from feedlots. Feedlots require, well, feed. Feed comes from plants. Plants that are grown somewhere else, on land that obviously is "agricultural land." More than half of U.S. grain production goes to feeding livestock.
The U.S. may not be in any sort of "shortage" or food "crisis" because of meat production, but the fact is that meat production does require more resources, and that does have a significant impact given the shifts in Western diet over the past century or so. And there are other environmental impacts from the massive animal production too. Though it's perhaps not an issue on the immediate horizon, long-term the modern industrial agriculture dependence on fossil fuels and byproducts is not sustainable. Shifting resources toward meat production (fossil fuels, water resources, makes it more likely that sustainability issues will arise sooner.
(Note I'm really NOT an absolutist on this. I enjoy a good steak as much as most people. But saying "meat production does not necessarily impact the production of grains and vegetables" when half of our grain goes to feed animals that ultimately are consumed by people in a much less efficient system... well, there ARE impacts.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @05:19PM
Feedlots are a symptom, not the disease. At feedlots, they feed the animals a diet that is primarily corn, even though it is one of the last things that cows should eat and causes tons of health issues, specifically because corn is so cheap. Because they feed them so much, they gain weight faster but that increases the fat content of the meat, among other problems. However, the costs are not as different as people think. Feedlot cows from birth to slaughter give you about 2x the profit as pastured cows, because the food is cheaper, they grow just under 50% faster. But the sale price is lower per pound, and they, surprisingly, take up more room per cow overall, have higher vet and preventative medical costs. The real problem is FC being artificially cheaper destroys the cost parity between types. If FC corn was at real market rates, then the cost is basically even. The only real benefit to feedlots is that they can be put on land that is even more borderline than pasture land.