[hbogert]

Of course it's more complicated than just naming numbers.

Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.

Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?

Don't get me wrong, I think that the bio industry has taken things to the extreme, but simply saying meat is inefficient and naming some numbers is not giving us a proper basis for discussion to really address how we can make things durable.

[midland_trucker]

It was a specific rebuttal to the parent comment which seemed to not understand the reality of resources in vs resources out of animal agriculture. Of course you can caveat a lot about my comment, beef for instance is arguably the most inefficient example of meat you could cite (amongst slightly less inefficient alternatives) but illustrates the problem well. That is the nature of compressing such a complex issue into a small HN comment.

> Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.

Right - the discussion is about land use. We don't typically eat animal feed but allocate an enormous sq footage that could have been used to grow something we would might like to consume directly.

> Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?

Agree, we have plentiful access to drinking water in the UK and so have enough to allocate to irrigation and all the other water intensive activities involved to do this. Unfortunately on this particular point, the majority of the beef you eat does not come from here. This issue becomes much more pertinent if you live in say California or Spain.