But this is obviously not scalable/sustainable. If everyone wanted to eat grassfed beef that lives in free range fields multiple times a week, we'd very quickly run out of space and other resources. Not to mention you're still contributing heavily to climate change, unless "bio-regenerative" also means restoring the atmosphere for a zero carbon impact.
At the end of the day, we all need to eat less meat.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Grass fed beef does not add to Climate change, as all bio-emissions are bound in a cycle. Unlike typical mass production which is importing feed from far abroad, often burning a good chunk of rainforest in the process on doing so.
Not to take away from your primary point, though. I'd much rather have meat be valued as a high quality nutrient source rather than something cheap you can take for granted.
>Grass fed beef does not add to Climate change, as all bio-emissions are bound in a circle. Unlike typical mass production which is importing feed from far abroad, often burning a good chunk of rainforest in the process on doing so.
There are many studies that show that beef, grass fed or not, add to Climate change.
The grass fed meme crowd thinks they are saving the rainforest by not eating beef fed with soy from monocultures in Latin America but conveniently forget that in order to feed the whole world with grass fed animals you would need more land than the world can provide. Much of the amazon is being cut down to create pastures for cattle. It's a complete tragedy.
>Beef cattle use nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land but account for less than 2% of global calories and 5% of global protein consumed.
It adds a lot. Cows produce a lot of methane which is more destructive than CO2 (though lasts shorter). Also, in transportation, the main contributor is the last mile so "local" produce doesn't necessarily have less contributions per transported unit.
Grass-fed cows still produce methane and require vehicles to transport them when bought and when slaughtered. The fields they are kept in will also need trees to be cleared and plants killed in favour of grass. How does that not add to climate change?
Animal protein raises pressure on your kidneys for hours after consumption. By eating that you are inflaming your kidneys and increasing the likelihood of a wide range of consequences.
Turns out living has consequences no matter how you live. Choose what you are willing to die for.
This is almost certainly not true. Outside of heavy metals there are very few things that "accumulate" in the body and I can't find any papers mentioning nut toxins having this effect.
The first study[1] I could find that included analysis of vegan vs non-vegan diets' correlation with blood PFAS levels suggest that vegan diets are negatively correlated with some classes of PFAS (and neutral with the other classes analyzed): "The strongest correlations with food groups, derived from a food frequency questionnaire, were observed between levels of PFOA and water consumption (in case of the total study population, n = 72), and between levels of PFOS as well as PFNA and the consumption of ‘meat and meat products’".
I'm not proposing that a single study is proof, but I'm default-skeptical of dietary claims without strong evidence, especially ones that comport with other aspects of worldview or preference.
These are all mitigated by a balanced diet, while deriding diets high in nut content you also neglect to mention that eating large amounts of beef significantly raises your risk of multiple forms of cancer.
Not to mention that side effects like those caused by almond consumption, would require eating hundreds of grams of almonds a day.
You'd be hard pressed to find anything absolutely toxin-free. Many toxins have non-linear effects, negligible at very low doses, so there are advantages to diversification.
Even if you could find a handful of foods that are absolutely toxin-free, eating only those would greatly reduce the diversity in your diet.
The obvious optimum is a diet minimal in the effect-weighted sum of its toxins, subject to the constraint of also providing healthy levels of all essential nutrients... which the GP is attempting to reasonably approximate without requiring years of research into the exact diet by proposing toxin risk diversification.
Eating a primarily organic, whole-food, plant-based diet avoids lots of toxins that build up along the food chain, while still offering a huge diversity of foods.
There are far, far, more species of plants to eat than species of animals in human diets.
Right, but it's also "all diets have some level of toxins so they are comparable".
Primarily whole-food, plant-based diets have the lowest level of toxins.
For example, see the Cleveland's Clinic recommendation for a low-inflammation diet which recommends diets like Mediterranean, DASH and whole-food vegetarian.
How do plants defend themselves? Do you know what apple seeds contain? Have you researched cashews yet? Do you cherry pick what science you think is real science!
Cows do an outstanding job turning grass and other inedible things into a foodstuff that not only has extreme nutritional value, but resonates with me on a cellular level.
It'd be cool if we can grow steak in future, but I think it'd be very hard to replicate an actual cow without adding toxins, and I worry that they'll make some ridiculous low-fat or low-cholesterol version based on nutritional "science".
