You’re just using an animal to perform the processing instead
Which they do efficiently. There’s no grass in the resulting meat, or feed, or sunlight. That’s why they’re not on the ingredient list. And water is in everything.
I wonder why poultry or beef isn’t required to list all of the antibiotics or growth horomones that those animals were fed as included ingredients.
Per the Iowa Farm Bureau, because there ARE NO antibiotics or residue in the resultant meat. An ingredient is something actually in the product. Nobody says there’s gasoline in your food vegetables because of the harvester, or insects in your vegetables because… well there actually are!
As for growth hormones… nobody has to say there’s growth hormones in it because they’re everywhere. Beef from a hormone-treated cow has thousands (to millions) of times less growth hormonesthan many plant-based products like peanuts or soy flour. Nobody has to list Estrogen on soy milk.
They produce meat more efficiently than any artifical process, especially any process line using nuclear medicine (what businesses are trying now).
And for what it’s worth, there is no other mechanism that converts indigestible starches into highly digestible proteins efficiently.
It’s not like everything put into an animal is converted into edible flesh, not even a tenth of it is.
The typical chicken caloric conversion rate is 2-5x. That means 10000 calories of feed produces 5000 total calories that are higher quality than the feed was, about 2000 of those calories is meat, where the remaining 3000 is used for other purposes, like creating broths. This is incredibly, miraculously efficient.
Real-world numbers seem a bit better. 100-320kcal/day (more in winter and as they grow) per day in feed, and produce 2500 of straight meat after 40 days. That looks like more like 4x conversion than 5x.
Egg-laying chickens have a ramp up (where you feed them but they don’t produce eggs), but then produce an egg almost daily. That’s 80 calories in eggs for 260-340 calories in feed. (so almost 100% return on the extra cals). And yes, you can still eat the chicken when she’s too old to lay eggs. She’ll just be a bit more tough.
So if you’re comparing the production of meat to burning gasoline, then no chicken is not as efficient. If you’re comparing it to any food-related process (or hell, many mechanical processes), it’s downright jawdroppingly good.
Compare to corn. Only 10% of the calories in a typical grain crop are edible by humans. You’ll never guess what we use most of the other 90% for.
Nuclear medicine? Are you talking about meat grown in fermentation chambers? Do you think that’s the only alternative to animal flesh? Those things don’t even exist on a mass production scale yet and plenty of people avoid animal products somehow. I don’t know why you think I’m advocating for such a process.
It’s also a myth that we feed animals only things that are inedible to us, edible soy and grain is very pervasive in animal agriculture. You’re also conveniently leaving out additional land, water, and energy use as inputs, as well as negative outputs (though tbf I only mentioned inputs). I’m also curious about your 90-10 ratio, I’d be incredibly surprised if in reality 90% of net energy in animal feed came from inedible crop, especially when you include pasture feeding and silage in the mix. I thought experts agreed that we could free up a significant amount of land by removing animals from our food system while still feeding the same amount of people, this wouldn’t be true if animals made our existing croplands more efficient or were at the very least neutral.
Nuclear medicine? Are you talking about meat grown in fermentation chambers?
Yeah. The topic is efficiency. I was covering all the bases.
Do you think that’s the only alternative to animal flesh?
No. There are no alternatives to animal flesh.
Those things don’t even exist on a mass production scale yet and plenty of people avoid animal products somehow
And I know people who commute grandfathered trucks that get single-digit miles per gallon. I didn’t say it was strictly impossible, just inefficient.
You’re also conveniently leaving out additional land, water, and energy use as inputs, as well as negative outputs (though tbf I only mentioned inputs).
No I’m not. Go check out all my past debates or cited references on this topic because I’m not rehashing that shit again on a work day.
It’s also a myth that we feed animals only things that are inedible to us, edible soy and grain is very pervasive in animal agriculture
I didn’t actually argue that here. The strict statistic is 86% of cattle feed is human inedible (and much of what’s human edible is provided at the end to “fatten the cow up” so we get the maximum number of people fed by that one cow having to die). A large percent of chicken and turkey feed is technically human edible (it’s low-grade millet) but not particularly nutritious.
I’m also curious about your 90-10 ratio, I’d be incredibly surprised if in reality 90% of net energy in animal feed came from inedible crop, especially when you include pasture feeding and silage in the mix
Do me a favor and reread my comment when you calm down. That’s not what I said. I said that 90% of crops like corn are human inedible. And that they go to feed. Not that 90% of what animals eat is crops like corn. You’re absolutely right that much of it absolutely comes from cover crops in pasture and silage. Thanks for defending my side.
I thought experts agreed that we could free up a significant amount of land by removing animals from our food system while still feeding the same amount of people
No. Some experts say that. Experts agree that we could free up significant amounts of land by reducing meat intake, but every expert I’ve read does not think it’s some linear thing where zero meat is the ideal. The largest part and problem is the symbiotic relationship between agriculture and horticulture. 67% of TOTAL agricultural land use is in what’s called “marginal land”, land that cannot be used to grow crops or forested. It can ONLY be used for livestock or nothing.
The problem only starts when livestock need more land than the marginal land that’s being used. Until that point, from a land point of view, livestock like cattle are overall increasing the efficiency of the land by producing food where it couldn’t be produced otherwise, largely consuming calories that could not be used otherwise.
this wouldn’t be true if animals made our existing croplands more efficient or were at the very least neutral.
That’s because it’s not true. A lot of local farmers only survive because they have livestock. Let me ask you a question . Why would a farmer have a milk cow if the milk sold for less than the cost to feed the cow? Because that’s the situation right now in my local farms, and nobody’s selling their cows.
And in case you don’t know the answer, because they’re saving cow manure instead of buying chemical fertilizers. And they’re saving some money on feed by using their crop waste. Ultimately, they’re able to reduce their cost so the milk price is a breakeven, and then the fertilizer is a slight profit. If they got rid of that cow (ok, cows plural. Often 3 or 4 at the farms I’m thinking of), they would go out of business.___
important question
Let me ask you a question. What matters to you? Do you really care about what’s good for the environment, or do you just care about people not eating animals? Because if you’re arguing about the environment because you ethically oppose the eating of animals, that’s a tainted argument even if it has facts smattered in, and you have to admit it to yourself.
It’s only worth us having this discussion if you can tell me to my face that the only reason you’re arguing for veganism is environmental. That you don’t have an ethical problem with eating meat and you’re not convinced that meat is unhealthy.
Performing voir dire on someone you are having a discussion is odd. I don’t ask people I’m debating vegan adjacent topics with if they eat meat, that can be statistically presumed. I also don’t assume they can’t say anything true because they have an objective of wanting to continue to eat meat, and that’s often laid bare during or even at the start of discussion. Facts exist separately from the people stating them. Hypocrites can be right. People with biases can be right, and everyone has biases.
I am a vegan but I had been arguing against livestock use from an environmental perspective for many years before becoming a vegan or even a reductionist. In my mind eating animals was something like using disposable plastic. I participated in the use of animals and plastics but thought the only recourse was a legal one. Arguments of animal ethics are what ultimately brought me around to the idea that a personal boycott was ethically obligatory, because the harm to individuals from individuals was easier to see. Though after learning some ideas from utilitarianism related to statistics and commutative events as well as ideas from virtue ethics about modeling behavior and living heterodoxy my stance on boycotts or at least reduction in other areas has changed as well.
I’ll avoid responding to your arguments on the main subject because it would pressure you to respond when you’ve made it clear that you don’t want to continue having the discussion based on who I am. But I’m hoping I’ve answered your important question and given you something to think about on the topic of intellectual honesty.
I don’t ask people I’m debating vegan adjacent topics with if they eat meat
I didn’t ask if you were a vegan. I was asking why you’re repeating arguments I’ve rebutted a dozen times in lemmy. We’re deep enough that no random person is going to read this, so if you’re just arguing for veganism, it can stop now. I need to know if the environmental argument is foundational to you before I waste time repeating stuff I’ve said plenty of times elsewhere, knowing you’ll be the only person to read it.
To be honest, I’ve dealt with the classic 3-leg gishgallop of this topic (environment, health, ethics) enough that I’m learning to disengage fast. I just need to be sure there’s value in the conversation before it just turns into that. That’s not about voir dire. It’s about Street Epistemology. If we’re discussing something non-foundational to you, the conversation is frankly meaningless.
And frankly, I had to ask the question because you are bringing up infamous objections (like “land use” in full ignorance or negligence of marginal land) that are as much a staple of the vegan-missionary movement as… well, anything I hear out of pro-life arguments.
I am a vegan but I had been arguing against livestock use from an environmental perspective for many years before becoming a vegan or even a reductionist
Interesting. Are you of the position that there is no world where even a single livestock animal being consumed is *ever environmentally better than that same animal NOT being consumed? Do you have well-conceived answers to the symbiosis problem and animal population problem? I mean, is it a goal for the Western World’s carbon impact to dip below pre-industrial levels, and do you genuinely think fossil fuel climate change can be circumvented by terraforming our methane footprint artificially? Is there a meaningful view here that might change, or will it remain secondary to your vegan ethical position?
Though after learning some ideas from utilitarianism related to statistics and commutative events as well as ideas from virtue ethics about modeling behavior and living heterodoxy my stance on boycotts or at least reduction in other areas has changed as well.
Peter Singer, I presume? This is actually a separate topic I have some experience discussing. I, too, am largely Utilitarian in my ethical foundation. But I do strongly reject his argument on many grounds. A rejection I don’t want to intermingle with an environmental discussion, if you get my point above about how easily these discussions can turn into a 3-legged stool of constantly rotating complex discussions.
I’ll avoid responding to your arguments on the main subject because it would pressure you to respond when you’ve made it clear that you don’t want to continue having the discussion based on who I am
Sorry to steal your decision to use court terminology, but I object. I simply don’t want to respond if you aren’t arguing for the environment because it matters to you. I need to understand whether you being convinced that consuming some animals is good for the environment would CYV on anything at all, or if you’d just lean on “but I think it’s wrong to consume animals”.
Which they do efficiently. There’s no grass in the resulting meat, or feed, or sunlight. That’s why they’re not on the ingredient list. And water is in everything.
Per the Iowa Farm Bureau, because there ARE NO antibiotics or residue in the resultant meat. An ingredient is something actually in the product. Nobody says there’s gasoline in your food vegetables because of the harvester, or insects in your vegetables because… well there actually are!
As for growth hormones… nobody has to say there’s growth hormones in it because they’re everywhere. Beef from a hormone-treated cow has thousands (to millions) of times less growth hormonesthan many plant-based products like peanuts or soy flour. Nobody has to list Estrogen on soy milk.
Animals do not produce food efficiently. It’s not like everything put into an animal is converted into edible flesh, not even a tenth of it is.
They produce meat more efficiently than any artifical process, especially any process line using nuclear medicine (what businesses are trying now).
And for what it’s worth, there is no other mechanism that converts indigestible starches into highly digestible proteins efficiently.
The typical chicken caloric conversion rate is 2-5x. That means 10000 calories of feed produces 5000 total calories that are higher quality than the feed was, about 2000 of those calories is meat, where the remaining 3000 is used for other purposes, like creating broths. This is incredibly, miraculously efficient.
Real-world numbers seem a bit better. 100-320kcal/day (more in winter and as they grow) per day in feed, and produce 2500 of straight meat after 40 days. That looks like more like 4x conversion than 5x.
Egg-laying chickens have a ramp up (where you feed them but they don’t produce eggs), but then produce an egg almost daily. That’s 80 calories in eggs for 260-340 calories in feed. (so almost 100% return on the extra cals). And yes, you can still eat the chicken when she’s too old to lay eggs. She’ll just be a bit more tough.
So if you’re comparing the production of meat to burning gasoline, then no chicken is not as efficient. If you’re comparing it to any food-related process (or hell, many mechanical processes), it’s downright jawdroppingly good.
Compare to corn. Only 10% of the calories in a typical grain crop are edible by humans. You’ll never guess what we use most of the other 90% for.
Nuclear medicine? Are you talking about meat grown in fermentation chambers? Do you think that’s the only alternative to animal flesh? Those things don’t even exist on a mass production scale yet and plenty of people avoid animal products somehow. I don’t know why you think I’m advocating for such a process.
It’s also a myth that we feed animals only things that are inedible to us, edible soy and grain is very pervasive in animal agriculture. You’re also conveniently leaving out additional land, water, and energy use as inputs, as well as negative outputs (though tbf I only mentioned inputs). I’m also curious about your 90-10 ratio, I’d be incredibly surprised if in reality 90% of net energy in animal feed came from inedible crop, especially when you include pasture feeding and silage in the mix. I thought experts agreed that we could free up a significant amount of land by removing animals from our food system while still feeding the same amount of people, this wouldn’t be true if animals made our existing croplands more efficient or were at the very least neutral.
Yeah. The topic is efficiency. I was covering all the bases.
No. There are no alternatives to animal flesh.
And I know people who commute grandfathered trucks that get single-digit miles per gallon. I didn’t say it was strictly impossible, just inefficient.
No I’m not. Go check out all my past debates or cited references on this topic because I’m not rehashing that shit again on a work day.
I didn’t actually argue that here. The strict statistic is 86% of cattle feed is human inedible (and much of what’s human edible is provided at the end to “fatten the cow up” so we get the maximum number of people fed by that one cow having to die). A large percent of chicken and turkey feed is technically human edible (it’s low-grade millet) but not particularly nutritious.
Do me a favor and reread my comment when you calm down. That’s not what I said. I said that 90% of crops like corn are human inedible. And that they go to feed. Not that 90% of what animals eat is crops like corn. You’re absolutely right that much of it absolutely comes from cover crops in pasture and silage. Thanks for defending my side.
No. Some experts say that. Experts agree that we could free up significant amounts of land by reducing meat intake, but every expert I’ve read does not think it’s some linear thing where zero meat is the ideal. The largest part and problem is the symbiotic relationship between agriculture and horticulture. 67% of TOTAL agricultural land use is in what’s called “marginal land”, land that cannot be used to grow crops or forested. It can ONLY be used for livestock or nothing.
The problem only starts when livestock need more land than the marginal land that’s being used. Until that point, from a land point of view, livestock like cattle are overall increasing the efficiency of the land by producing food where it couldn’t be produced otherwise, largely consuming calories that could not be used otherwise.
That’s because it’s not true. A lot of local farmers only survive because they have livestock. Let me ask you a question . Why would a farmer have a milk cow if the milk sold for less than the cost to feed the cow? Because that’s the situation right now in my local farms, and nobody’s selling their cows.
And in case you don’t know the answer, because they’re saving cow manure instead of buying chemical fertilizers. And they’re saving some money on feed by using their crop waste. Ultimately, they’re able to reduce their cost so the milk price is a breakeven, and then the fertilizer is a slight profit. If they got rid of that cow (ok, cows plural. Often 3 or 4 at the farms I’m thinking of), they would go out of business.___
important question
Let me ask you a question. What matters to you? Do you really care about what’s good for the environment, or do you just care about people not eating animals? Because if you’re arguing about the environment because you ethically oppose the eating of animals, that’s a tainted argument even if it has facts smattered in, and you have to admit it to yourself.
It’s only worth us having this discussion if you can tell me to my face that the only reason you’re arguing for veganism is environmental. That you don’t have an ethical problem with eating meat and you’re not convinced that meat is unhealthy.
Performing voir dire on someone you are having a discussion is odd. I don’t ask people I’m debating vegan adjacent topics with if they eat meat, that can be statistically presumed. I also don’t assume they can’t say anything true because they have an objective of wanting to continue to eat meat, and that’s often laid bare during or even at the start of discussion. Facts exist separately from the people stating them. Hypocrites can be right. People with biases can be right, and everyone has biases.
I am a vegan but I had been arguing against livestock use from an environmental perspective for many years before becoming a vegan or even a reductionist. In my mind eating animals was something like using disposable plastic. I participated in the use of animals and plastics but thought the only recourse was a legal one. Arguments of animal ethics are what ultimately brought me around to the idea that a personal boycott was ethically obligatory, because the harm to individuals from individuals was easier to see. Though after learning some ideas from utilitarianism related to statistics and commutative events as well as ideas from virtue ethics about modeling behavior and living heterodoxy my stance on boycotts or at least reduction in other areas has changed as well.
I’ll avoid responding to your arguments on the main subject because it would pressure you to respond when you’ve made it clear that you don’t want to continue having the discussion based on who I am. But I’m hoping I’ve answered your important question and given you something to think about on the topic of intellectual honesty.
They’re a case study in antivegan rhetoric, don’t worry about them.
I didn’t ask if you were a vegan. I was asking why you’re repeating arguments I’ve rebutted a dozen times in lemmy. We’re deep enough that no random person is going to read this, so if you’re just arguing for veganism, it can stop now. I need to know if the environmental argument is foundational to you before I waste time repeating stuff I’ve said plenty of times elsewhere, knowing you’ll be the only person to read it.
To be honest, I’ve dealt with the classic 3-leg gishgallop of this topic (environment, health, ethics) enough that I’m learning to disengage fast. I just need to be sure there’s value in the conversation before it just turns into that. That’s not about voir dire. It’s about Street Epistemology. If we’re discussing something non-foundational to you, the conversation is frankly meaningless.
And frankly, I had to ask the question because you are bringing up infamous objections (like “land use” in full ignorance or negligence of marginal land) that are as much a staple of the vegan-missionary movement as… well, anything I hear out of pro-life arguments.
Interesting. Are you of the position that there is no world where even a single livestock animal being consumed is *ever environmentally better than that same animal NOT being consumed? Do you have well-conceived answers to the symbiosis problem and animal population problem? I mean, is it a goal for the Western World’s carbon impact to dip below pre-industrial levels, and do you genuinely think fossil fuel climate change can be circumvented by terraforming our methane footprint artificially? Is there a meaningful view here that might change, or will it remain secondary to your vegan ethical position?
Peter Singer, I presume? This is actually a separate topic I have some experience discussing. I, too, am largely Utilitarian in my ethical foundation. But I do strongly reject his argument on many grounds. A rejection I don’t want to intermingle with an environmental discussion, if you get my point above about how easily these discussions can turn into a 3-legged stool of constantly rotating complex discussions.
Sorry to steal your decision to use court terminology, but I object. I simply don’t want to respond if you aren’t arguing for the environment because it matters to you. I need to understand whether you being convinced that consuming some animals is good for the environment would CYV on anything at all, or if you’d just lean on “but I think it’s wrong to consume animals”.