[yes_man]

The animals eat a lot more plants for a pound of meat they gain than humans would need if we only ate the plants. We are in the first day of this year and already over 120 million animals have been killed in the US for food. Approximations on amount of animals killed each year for food in the USA vary, but it is in tens of billions. Can you imagine the strain natural ecosystem would need to sustain to support tens of billions of new animals every year? We are already on the edge when feeding those animals with industrial crops.

[burfog]

Humans are not ruminants. We can not survive on hay. We can survive on the high-nutrition parts of plants, but creating these parts is resource-intensive. In some cases the whole plant is simply difficult to grow (pests, fertilizer, etc.) and in other cases we don't get very much food from each plant.

There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.

Goats and sheep are happy to eat the weeds on a rocky hill, and cattle do almost as well.

Other food animals are happy to eat disgusting waste. Pigs, chickens, and catfish are especially willing.

[danans]

> There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.

There is also a whole lot of cashew attached to that tree, and the same tree produces more, year after year.

[chukye]

Exactly! Humans to survive need to combine a lot of fancy vegetables, we can't live eating grass...