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Nearly 100% of my meat comes from locally raised grass-fed-and-finished cows. They are rotationally grazed and live their whole lives in the outdoors. It is actually much, much cheaper than buying meat from a supermarket - ground beef is half the price, steaks are as little as 10%, because all cuts are priced the same. (My dairy comes from another, similar farm, and while it is much better, it is more expensive.) I also went all through the slaughterhouse and no, there's no kids there. I eat a lot of eggs. 100% of my eggs and the occasional chicken come from my parents, who, with twelve chickens, produce an insane surplus of eggs, letting them eat whatever bugs they find and feeding them scraps. People will argue this isn't scalable, and maybe it isn't. But the price of my beef suggests it is underutilized at this time. Certainly more rural and semirural people could keep chickens. I would favor this alternative anyway, since industrial-scale food production isn't just inhumane, it produces inferior products that are subject to enormous risks and shocks as producers race to centralize and become more and more efficient. You don't want hyperefficiency in your food supply. Hyperefficiency means fragility. Massive industrialized agriculture is its own ecological disaster. The farming of corn for ethanol (!!!) and the massive, endless fields of soybeans and canola in the US midwest (foods eaten by almost no American a few decades ago) are permanently destroying the ecology of nearly half the US. It's annihilating topsoil at alarming rates, eradicated huge swaths of natural wildlife, and filled watersheds with massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides which are then contributing to killing all the fish. You see how we've come full circle. Do you know what would be great and sustainable for the midwest? Fill the plains with cows. For thousands of years, they were filled with ruminants. The cows must be kept in tightly packed herds to emulate their behavior when predators are present. This will regenerate the topsoil, as that's what formed much of it in the first place, and end the flow of poison into the waterways. I'm not opposed to returning the buffalo instead, if you prefer. You talk about greenwashing - that's a big part of the push behind veganism. Obviously there's sincere people like you, but there's a lot of money in producing highly processed foods and (soon) artificial meat. Highly processed foods (besides being a health disaster) can be easily produced via "food science" from relatively stable, controllable inputs, which animals are not. They are much easier to scale, which is where the real money comes from when you're selling commodities. Frequently, even when one input does become a problem, it can be replaced with no obvious impact to the consumer. It's not about taking a holistic look what what we need to do ecologically and environmentally, which would include meat. It's about cash. > fated to death from birth Everything born into this world will die. That's nothing special about livestock. |
https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/humane-meat
> It is actually much, much cheaper than buying meat from a supermarket
Thanks to subsidies ... taxes taken also from vegans ;)
> the massive, endless fields of soybeans
"More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh"
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
> Fill the plains with cows. For thousands of years, they were filled with ruminants
You need also predators ... and I don't mean weekend hunters. Without predators the ruminants tend to stay in one place and eat everything, till nothing than desert remains. See Sahara and near east.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09596836166704... Blame it on the goats? Desertification in the Near East during the Holocene
> there's a lot of money in producing highly processed foods and (soon) artificial meat
Not yet, and artificial meat may not be here in next few decades (the scale is the problem). Soon is an overstretch. Artificial meat doesn't need to be highly processed ... in principle it's just plant protein (flour), starches, colorings (red beet etc.) and spices, maybe oils and vitamines. No magic, no complicated processes involving toxic chemicals etc (depends on the oils, tho).
> holistic look what what we need to do ecologically and environmentally, which would include meat
Meat is not necessary in those equations. We don't need to eat meat to live and prosper. We have composting and syntropic agriculture. We don't need animal inputs in agriculture. We can rewild areas used for animal farming (75% of 50% agriland of habitable land) and let the wildife rebound and manage the ecosystems. We can restore carbon sinks (double the forests) and stop anthropogenic wild life die offs. We don't have to rape the nature as we do now. For that the vegan movement is the logic outcome.
>> fated to death from birth
> Everything born into this world will die
https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch