[brippalcharrid]

Last I heard, the subset of beans that have been somewhat developed for human consumption are nonetheless still full of antinutrients like glutamates and lectins that function as a defence mechanism and which mean that the nutrients that they do contain (and that survive processing) have a very low bioavailability relative to components like starches. I for one prefer the use of regenerative pastureland as opposed to intensively farmed monocrops that rely on artificial pesticides, oil-derived fertilizer and air freight transport (!). Advocacy articles like this tend to a paint a skewed picture of land-usage-per-unit-of-nutrition and nutrition-per-unit-of-food with graphs like these, as well as other assumptions that they're implying about pastureland being suitable for agriculture (it often isn't).

[adrianN]

Regenerative pasture land is nice, but it's not productive enough to satisfy our hunger for meat. Most meat calories are produced by feeding animals intensively farmed monocrops.

[brippalcharrid]

Again, I'm not sure that's so clear once you factor in bioavailability, and even if you were to use nitrate fertilizers and to cover the hillsides in legume monocrops to then feed then to ruminants, that would still end up being objectively better for human nutrition, as a use of natural resources. They're a state-of-the-art technology for intelligently transforming low-value biomatter into high-value animal fat and protein on an industrial scale; we aren't anywhere near that level of sophistication, and we dismiss it at our peril and to the detriment of human health.

Besides that, "Our hunger" for any resource will always grow to be arbitrarily large if there are enough of us (and our consumption of them are typically governed by things like market economies, private property and borders), and we're all welcome to develop our own innovative technologies and methods of production that can feed (or house, or entertain, or occupy) an arbitrarily large number of people to the level that we're capable of. So by all means, people should develop new foodstuffs and build multistory subterranean megastructures, and develop new power sources to pursue their own nutritional vision if they're motivated to solve future problems as they see them.