| Fast food has never been a cornerstone of healthy living, and I reckon few people eat hamburgers at home. The real benefit, in my mind, is not removing the staple treat of fast food from the market, while vastly reducing our need to farm red meat. I would posit adoption of plant based diets "under the hood" of fast food (and hopefully restaurants) is one of the easiest, most effective ways of dramatically reducing red meat consumption. This has an enormous impact. Most cropland is used for livestock feed, and 1/3 of ALL US LAND is used for pasture. This is why a plant based diet is on the top 10 ways to fight global climate change (4. Plant-rich diet), and starts to remove incentives for slash-and-burn agriculture (5. Better tropical forest health). Growing a lb of meat requires significantly more land, water, (and therefore fertilizer, etc), than the equivalent macros from plants. "That is, even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target. " https://getpocket.com/explore/item/if-everyone-ate-beans-ins... https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.drawdown.org/the-book Next we should tackle ethanol (1/3 of corn yields go to ethanol). Any "well it may not be better for you" argument against this approach does seem to ignore that we believed red meat was bad for you for decades and we still spend so much of our resources growing red meat. |
There are a lot of choices for hamburger in the grocery stores I go to. Both fresh ground meat, and frozen preformed hamburgers. Have you looked? Someone must be buying them.