[BurningFrog]

These "if everyone did X" arguments are very tricky.

If everyone went to buy food at my local grocery store, the 7 billion people in such a small building would cause an enormous humanitarian catastrophe.

I don't think that means there is anything wrong with me shopping there, and I don't think there is anything wrong in eating grassfed free range beef either.

[throwaway5752]

There are actually 8.1 billion humans. Say that everyone wants beef for dinner, .5 lb / person, rounding down to 3 lbs weekly, rounding down to 150 lbs per year. That is 1.2 trillion pounds of beef per year. The real number is much lower due to age demographics, dietary choices, and poverty (about 60 lbs per person, per year in just the US) but let's keep it simple;, "If everyone in the world wanted 3 lbs of grass fed beef a week, how would that work out?"

400 lbs of meat per head of cattle is 3,000,000,000 cows. 5 acres per head of pure grass fed, double number of animals because of average slaugher at 2 years, and that is 30 billion acres devoted to grazing. For context 125 million acres are utilized for cattle (feed and grazing) in the US. Globally that is 3 times more than is used for all agriculture, globally. This is ignoring dairy.

So this is not very tricky. It is wildly unrealistic for grass fed beef to be anything but an extreme luxury food without large numbers of people starving.

[AlecSchueler]

> I don't think that means there is anything wrong with me shopping there, and I don't think there is anything wrong in eating grassfed free range beef either.

Why? The first example is absurd and the logic that someone would rely on in making an argument against you shopping somewhere would also be absurd. But the second point is not absurd, as enough people are already eating meat to the point that ecosystems are severely strained.

[__MatrixMan__]

We have many grocery stores. We have one planet. It's quite reasonable to discuss whether certain people tax it beyond their share.

It's really the size of the range that's a problem. Eating food that eats food is a really inefficient way to get your energy, so you have to offset it by letting that cow range widely. You have to ask: what this that space not doing because it's currently supporting a cow instead? What have you taken away that other people need?

[belorn]

Those kind of discussions generally leads downhill unless people are very willing to partake in open and philosophical discussions. What is a fair share, and what is an efficient way?

All major food production is taxing the planet beyond what it can handle, among those being the use of artificial fertilizers in farming. Using a limited resource like fossil fuels to feed people is extremely inefficient when the ocean and land has plenty enough nutrients already. Using land itself is also fairly inefficient use of space when land is only 30% of the earth, with 70% being covered by water. Nothing beats farming on water when it comes to land efficiency.

Looking at land efficiency a second time, the size of the range is not the only factor. Caribous uses a massive amount of land for very small amount of meat, but the land they use tend to have an average human population per square mile close to 0. Using land located in a rain forests is much worse than using land located within the polar circle. There is a argument that using animal ranges in some locations is both good in term of land efficiency and bio diversity.

[__MatrixMan__]

There are interesting philosophical conversations to have about fairness and efficiency, but they come up when you're in the ballpark of what some people would consider fair or efficient while some others would differ.

This is not that.

A cow spends its whole life radiating heat into the environment. That's energy that could be powering me. It's a pretty simple watts-in-watts-out calculation, and it's nowhere near efficient.

Sure, maybe no humans want to live where the cows typically graze, but there are other organisms which contribute to carbon capture and clean air and clean water and pollination and disease control... And they are displaced when you've got cows gobbling up all the new growth and preventing forests from forming.

What's unfair is that those ecosystem services are being degraded in service of a few people's dietary habits, and that their loss is subsequently impacting the rest of us.

Yeah, maybe there's a biodiversity benefit to controlling grazer population through hunting, but only as a stopgap until we manage to reintroduce natural predators which don't have to be policed or practice restraint: predator/prey population dynamics are better equilibrium seekers than government regulation re: permits and tags.

[belorn]

Where the ballpark is a good starting question. Is a cow better or worse compared to artificial fertilizers? Looking at the devastation caused by run-off from farms in the baltic ocean, there is a man made underwater desert that is constantly growing with the current size of approximately 100,000 km2. Those dead zones (as they are called), lead to massive death of all aquatic organisms.

If we talking about fairness, food should be sustainable and not causing massive harm to the environment. That seems however to be outside the ballpark of what people consider possible. The question is then where we should start.

[exitb]

There is not enough resources for everyone to eat sustainable beef. Some people need to eat unsustainably, so others can eat the sustainable stuff. Which is, obviously, unsustainable.