What counts as arable? Can you grow literally nothing on it, or is it just unusable for mass industrial mono-cropping at a scale that competes?
IIRC even if ruminant grazing is the most efficient way to produce food on this land, it’s still be a severe environmental net negative as opposed to other non-food uses, namely rewilding. Of course this is true for cash crops as well, and I don’t know how the payoff compares, but a lot of animal agriculture defenders like to use this argument to imply that grazers can just be slotted in on the margins with no downside.
Based on the map in the article, a substantial portion of land still goes to farmed livestock feed. Eliminate all of that first and then we can actually see how much of this beef is purely ranched.
Meat eaters do love to champion the most ethical and environmental corners of their supply chain, and I appreciate that, but everyone I know that buys a half cow for their deep freezer from a sustainable local farmer refuses to draw the hard line in the fast food drive-thru. “Conscious” meat exists to justify all meat consumption rather than replace it in the supply chain, from my experience growing up on a small hobby farm trying to produce it.
What you’re describing in your last paragraph is virtue signaling, e.g publicly expressing some moral position to gain approval without actually following through on that moral position. That’s not something to appreciate.
It is extremely commonplace in meat eater circles to virtue signal about ethical meat and then completely ignore that for the vast majority of consumption. This is a huge difference between vegans and meat eaters.
Vegans aren’t virtue signaling, we actually have an understanding of what we believe to be a moral truth; it’s wrong to kill and harm things for your own pleasure, whether that be taste pleasure, sexual pleasure, whatever, and we extend that as far as we’re able to. We actively avoid food that purposefully necessitates killing and suffering.
Meat eaters advocate for some local maximum, like “I can’t give up meat because it’s too tasty, but I can at least avoid factory farming”, and then they’ll go to McDonalds 3 times a week once they’re outside of a discussion with a vegan.
I’m much less frustrated with people who both advocate for and commit to some moral position. If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they’ve known from birth, that’s better. It’s still wrong to kill something without it’s consent, but at the very least if they’re not virtue signaling they’re at least not trying to deceive others.
If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they’ve known from birth, that’s better.
There’s zero chance there’s a measurable amount of carnists who actually commit to that. There’s also no way you could produce the amount of meat carnists want to eat without factory farming.
Eventually I think lab meat will be cheaper than factory meat. When that happens there will be. Until then fast food will always be made with the cheapest ingredients possible. Until then I’ll be vegan.
, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem
They do not graze the same and these differences hurt ecosystems
Cows and bison differ in all behaviors — including how they stand, move and graze. Cattle spend almost double the time grazing — 45-49 percent — in comparison to bison — who spend just over a quarter of their time doing so (26-28 percent). And while land needs some amount of disturbance to enable soil turnover, it turns out that the kind of soil disturbance provided by cows trampling over the soil is not the best for preserving biodiversity. And these critical differences in grazing behavior have downstream effects on the ecosystems they inhabit.
[…]
The types of plants bison and cattle prefer to graze on are also remarkably different. Unlike cattle, who prefer to graze steadily on flowering herbs like clover, milkweed and sunflower, free-roaming bison cover a much larger area, grazing on different varieties of grass, such as perennial grasses, but leaving certain areas of the prairie untouched.
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
My responses to that are:
What counts as arable? Can you grow literally nothing on it, or is it just unusable for mass industrial mono-cropping at a scale that competes?
IIRC even if ruminant grazing is the most efficient way to produce food on this land, it’s still be a severe environmental net negative as opposed to other non-food uses, namely rewilding. Of course this is true for cash crops as well, and I don’t know how the payoff compares, but a lot of animal agriculture defenders like to use this argument to imply that grazers can just be slotted in on the margins with no downside.
Based on the map in the article, a substantial portion of land still goes to farmed livestock feed. Eliminate all of that first and then we can actually see how much of this beef is purely ranched.
Meat eaters do love to champion the most ethical and environmental corners of their supply chain, and I appreciate that, but everyone I know that buys a half cow for their deep freezer from a sustainable local farmer refuses to draw the hard line in the fast food drive-thru. “Conscious” meat exists to justify all meat consumption rather than replace it in the supply chain, from my experience growing up on a small hobby farm trying to produce it.
What you’re describing in your last paragraph is virtue signaling, e.g publicly expressing some moral position to gain approval without actually following through on that moral position. That’s not something to appreciate.
It is extremely commonplace in meat eater circles to virtue signal about ethical meat and then completely ignore that for the vast majority of consumption. This is a huge difference between vegans and meat eaters.
Vegans aren’t virtue signaling, we actually have an understanding of what we believe to be a moral truth; it’s wrong to kill and harm things for your own pleasure, whether that be taste pleasure, sexual pleasure, whatever, and we extend that as far as we’re able to. We actively avoid food that purposefully necessitates killing and suffering.
Meat eaters advocate for some local maximum, like “I can’t give up meat because it’s too tasty, but I can at least avoid factory farming”, and then they’ll go to McDonalds 3 times a week once they’re outside of a discussion with a vegan.
I’m much less frustrated with people who both advocate for and commit to some moral position. If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they’ve known from birth, that’s better. It’s still wrong to kill something without it’s consent, but at the very least if they’re not virtue signaling they’re at least not trying to deceive others.
There’s zero chance there’s a measurable amount of carnists who actually commit to that. There’s also no way you could produce the amount of meat carnists want to eat without factory farming.
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I wish there was a conscious meat fast food option.
Eventually I think lab meat will be cheaper than factory meat. When that happens there will be. Until then fast food will always be made with the cheapest ingredients possible. Until then I’ll be vegan.
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They do not graze the same and these differences hurt ecosystems
https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/
Which leads to:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
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