> meat that can exist anywhere with deforesting the amazon for meat alternatives ingredients.
Is this the case? A major problem with beef is that so much of it comes from the cleared Amazon. Also, meat intrinsically takes more space than vegetables because we still have to clear land to grow feed for the meat, so a 1:1 replacement of Amazonian beef with soy and chickpeas or whatever would be a massive increase in yield.
If one discovers that a brand of tshirt is being manufactured using slave labor, a reasonable response is to buy another brand of tshirt. Clearly more is needed to solve the problem, but the slave labor doesn't "rub off" on the other tshirt, it's obviously silly to say "don't wear tshirts, some of them are made by slaves".
It's no different with beef. Most beef in the USA comes from the USA, and you might raise various objections about the treatment of cattle, pollution from runoff, and so on, but it isn't contributing to rainforest deforestation, so that isn't a good reason to not eat it.
Crops grown for animal feed is still a major cause of deforestation and USA beef can still be culpable for contributing. Realistically, I think most US cattle is fed from domestic feed, but I know Brazil exports a lot of animal feed to Asia and Europe.
To expand on your metaphor, not only are the t-shirts made with slave labor, but the cotton grown is harvested and milled by slave labor and without supply chain transparency it’s impossible to know if the new brand is also using the slave-labor cotton.
grass fed or grass finished? Because if they graze for a bit, but then still have to fed a ton of feed crops to fatten them up fast enough, it's a distinction without a difference.
In the end, all versions of beef production remotely possible are either insanely inefficient in yield or in resource usage or objectively cruel (aka factory farms). A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).
> A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).
Is that true of a vegan diet high in fake meat? Highly wasteful because it extracts and uses a small amount from the input material and often the waste is old as animal feed. On top of that extra transport and energy inputs required, etc.
ON the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment. In Scotland (and other places) they are releasing cattle into the wild as part of rewilding!
>Highly wasteful because it extracts and uses a small amount from the input material and often the waste is old as animal feed. On top of that extra transport and energy inputs required, etc.
All of these apply to cattle as well and fake meat will still use less resources than real beef.
>On the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment
Not technically incorrect, but this is absolutely greenwashing
> Realistically, I think most US cattle is fed from domestic feed
I believe you could make this "all" without loss of accuracy, at least to three significant figures. Might have to relax "domestic" to cover Canada and Mexico, neither of which is deforesting to produce fodder.
The US is a major exporter of the crops fed to cattle, and livestock in general. The lack of supply chain transparency your counter-analogy relies on is nowhere in evidence in US agriculture.
Considering that alfalfa production is drying up the Colorado(?) river, wastefully and destructively producing feed crops at home instead of importing them is not the win you think it is.
> it isn't contributing to rainforest deforestation, so that isn't a good reason to not eat it.
Yes it is, only indirectly, as it's driving climate change. It's also destroying local ecosystems which you might have an interest in? Beef is just insanely inefficient as a food source. It's like finding out all t-shirts are manufactured using a process that throws 10lbs of manufactured cloth into a landfill for every shirt made.
> Not all beef is equal. Almost all the beef I eat is from the UK, and most of it grass fed.
I mean, all beef is equal in the sense that it's not an efficient use of resources, including space, to feed cattle vs growing crops that feed humans. That's basically true no matter where the land is.
Anyway, if we are talking about the Amazon, there is absolutely no conversation to be had that doesn't center on beef. Talking about Amazon deforestation specifically being driven by anything other than cattle ranching is so wrong it's evil, and plenty of UK beef also comes from the Amazon.
Which is an efficiency not required by us at the moment, and a mode of production that couldn't cover even a percent of the entire current or future meat production.
Our problem isn't tetris with land. We have way, way, way more land to produce food crops than we need to feed everyone, we don't need to optimize for the few places where we can raise a few cattle exclusively. We can feed the same amount of people using far less water, land, and power using a vegan-ish diet.
If tomorrow everyone switches to your proposed vegan diet, where does all the saved power, water and land go towards?
growing cattle keeps the land from turning into concrete. If you actually want to conserve land you want to use as much already deforested as possible for growing crops and then never deforest new land. Slowly you should work onto getting conservation NGOs to integrate it into government protected land.
Seems to me like a fools errand to optimize land use. The optimal use in the Americas for example was likely already there 14,000 years ago before humans arrived in Americas. We obviously can't go back, but we can improve land, but optimal ....
Are you seriously arguing that cattle ranching is what's keeping our lands healthy right now? I'm pretty sure just leaving them fallow would be infinitely better for the health of the soil and ecosystems within a few years.
Ok, then let's move all cattle production to lands that's not suitable for growing crops. I'd be extremely happy with that solution as it will eliminate almost all cattle ranching.
Most of the land cleared recently in Amazon is used to grow plants to feed to cattle. The knock on effects are kinda incredible, most recent Planet Earth series showed a bit.
I'm actually very surprised by these numbers, namely that all other top five importers except the UK are net exporters. My mental image of Netherlands and Germany (where I eat too much meat) was that of huge net importers, whose plant production output was in large parts an echo of the animal feed imports (feed gets converted into meat and dung...). Perhaps they are only net exporters by market value, but net importers by nutrient amount?
I would guess that imports are a small proportion of all animal feed in the UK. UK cattle are grassfed, albeit usually grain finished. ALso the breakdown does not say feed for what animals rather than where from: as the UK is right next to net exporters I imagine most of it comes from neighbours rather than half the planet away.
Similar vibe as replacing leather with microplastics or meat that can exist anywhere with deforesting the amazon for meat alternatives ingredients.