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Um. What now?

Livestock production is one of the leading causes of deforestation and is incredibly inefficient in terms of land/water resources required per calorie produced.

Also without getting into the abhorrent nature of factory farming you've got methane production from ruminants and increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and other health issues from meat consumption.

I have a risk of muscle gains from proper protein ingestion. And avoiding malnutrition. And happy taste buds. https://static.slickdealscdn.com/ima.../emot-LMAO.gifAhttps://static.slickdealscdn.com/ima.../emot-LMAO.gif

All of which is easy without animal protein if you have half a brain.

Listen, you can do you, I'm fine with that. You can advocate for more humane practices, I understand that, and I laud people for being compassionate. You could even march up and down the jungle and tell animals to stop eating each other in spite of the natural food chain (of which we are one of the alphas). I also think you're swimming upstream by jumping into threads like you did here, to troll me.

But once you start belittling and calling someone half-brained, well, gtfo my friend. Seriously. I don't have the patience for that. Nor do I want to curb meat eating, when it gives me a complete amino profile, is dense in protein, iron, B12 and creatine etc, and leads to higher and better regulated testosterone levels, and so on and so forth. I love pairing it with leafy greens and other items, I'm a high-performance nutrition nut to max my gym and running activities. And meat is part of that. I will enjoy my prime steak. You can enjoy not having your prime steak. Good day to you.

Livestock production is one of the leading causes of deforestation and is incredibly inefficient in terms of land/water resources required per calorie produced.

Also without getting into the abhorrent nature of factory farming you've got methane production from ruminants and increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and other health issues from meat consumption.

yawn, you'll never cancel burgers hippy

3.8% ...

I said average. Shake base and whip cream are the two most expensive things in the store per ounce. It's easier to control costs and product consistency when there's only one size offered, so that's why they did away with different sized shakes

Livestock production is one of the leading causes of deforestation and is incredibly inefficient in terms of land/water resources required per calorie produced.

In the U.S., most of that land/energy/water used for livestock is a sunk cost - we wouldn't get it back even if we stopped eating meat.

It all goes back to the Great Depression. It and the Dust Bowl [wikipedia.org] resulted in widespread crop and farm failures. For the first time in history, the country wasn't producing enough food to feed everyone. The government vowed never to let that happen again, and implemented several reforms to how crops (mostly corn) are grown in the U.S. You may have heard of some of these, and wondered why the hell we do it.

• The government guarantees it will buy crops at a certain price. This price is deliberately set higher than the market price. The higher price means farms produce more food than the country actually needs. The government then sells this food to supermarkets and such at a loss at market price (making this an agricultural subsidy).
• Some farmers are paid to not plant crops. This prevents them from selling their farm land to developers to turn into condos and housing developments, thus keeping their farms "on call". If farms elsewhere in the country happen to suffer crop failures due to natural disaster, blight (disease), or pestilence (animals), these reserve farms can immediately be fired up and crops planted there.

Both of these work to assure that the U.S. will always be able to produce enough food to feed everyone (distribution is another matter). But because the first policy results in a disconnect between market sell and buy prices, it results in constant overproduction. You're basically setting production high enough so that it's adequate in a worst-case year. But that means in a regular year production is too high. Every year when there isn't some sort of disaster, the U.S. produces a lot more food than it actually needs. The question then becomes, what do we do with all this extra food?

• Some of it becomes foreign aid for countries with a shortage of food.
• Some of the corn gets converted into high fructose corn syrup, so that the U.S. isn't as dependent on imported cane sugar. (Contrary to conspiracy theories, HFCS has about the same ratio of fructose and glucose as apples. So if you believe HFCS is bad for you, then you must also believe apples are bad for you. It's just called "high fructose" because it contains more fructose than regular corn syrup. It's only bad because Americans eat way too much of it, which would also happen even if we were using sucrose.)
• In the 1970s after the Arab Oil Embargo, someone got the bright idea to convert some of it to ethanol which we could use as a substitute for gasoline.
• But the bulk of it is used as animal feed for livestock, since Americans love meat.

Anyway, the key here is that this food is excess food which has already been produced. Not giving away foreign aid, not producing HFCS, not making ethanol*, and not feeding cattle won't give us back the land and water used to produce those crops. They're a sunk cost - the resources needed to produce those crops have already been consumed. You can't un-consume them. Your only choices are to use them in the uses I've listed (or come up with new ones), or let the food rot in silos where they become food for rats.

So stopping meat consumption (in the U.S.) won't result in a huge reduction in land, energy, and water use. All it will do is result in a bunch more excess grains and corn left over each year. We'd have to figure out a new use for it, or burn it, or the rat population will explode. None of which will reduce land, energy, or water use.

*(This was why corn ethanol was originally made. And why it made sense to make it even though (like meat production), it's a net energy loss. Because the cost to grow the corn was a sunk cost, you're going to lose that energy anyway. Might as well use it to produce ethanol (or meat) rather than produce nothing. Unfortunately, since then, the corn lobby has gotten Congress to pass a program where corn is grown for the specific purpose of producing ethanol. In that case, the cost to grow the corn is not a sunk cos, and all the costs and efficiencies remain relevant. It's a bad program because corn ethanol ends up costing us more energy to produce, than it gives back in the form of gasoline. From the numbers I've seen, only cane sugar and sugar beets have enough energy density to convert to ethanol at an energy gain.)

Thanks this was pretty informative. Some questions: What's to say that we can't adjust our production of grain/wheat/etc if we do cut back on meat production (due to decreased demand)? Couldn't some of those farms just go back to doing nothing and become a reserve? I have to assume that would cut back on some energy, water usage and possibly reduce emissions. Just curious, not trying to argue or anything.