Commenter birgerjohansson was kind enough to send me this link about how the UK has become the first country in the EU to approve the use of lab grown meat as pet food.
Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.
The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.
It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.
Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.
The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.
There are two main arguments for not eating meat. One is the ethical concern about killing animals for the benefit of humans. This is compounded by the practice of factory farming where animals are kept in appalling conditions. The other is the energy waste. There is a rough rule of thumb that says that when food is transformed from one form to another by passing through the digestive tract of an animal, only about 10% of the energy in the original food becomes usable food energy in the new form. In other words, when grain is used to feed (say) poultry, only 10% of the energy in the grain becomes chicken meat energy. Even with pasture-fed animals, it takes more land to feed the animals than it does to it takes to grow crops that give you the same amount of energy. All these arguments have convinced many people to become vegetarians or vegans or to eat only seafood.
Lab grown meat will take care of the humane concerns about killing animals but I am not sure as to whether it will solve the energy problem. Will producing lab grown meat on a large scale use less energy?
But before we even get to that stage, there are other obstacles that need to be overcome in terms of getting regulatory approval.
The previous UK government had been looking at fast-tracking the approval of cultivated meat for human consumption. The Food Standards Agency has said it is trying to find a way to bypass the long process of regulating a food product and bringing it to market, something the Conservative government was pushing for as a “Brexit benefit”.
…Other approaches vary significantly, and countries including Singapore and Israel have approved products for human consumption. However, in the US the states of Florida and Alabama have banned cultivated meat, with politicians having complained that the products threaten livestock farmers.
The cattle industry in the US has an extremely powerful lobby. Some of you may remember back in 1997 when they took on even Oprah Winfrey when on her highly popular TV show she dared to have on as a guest Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher and then director of the Humane Society’s Eating with a Conscience Campaign, at the time when there was concern about beef safety due to the emergence of ‘mad cow’ disease, whose proper name is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She was sued for ‘disparaging beef’.
During the discussion, Lyman argued that the risk in the United States of a BSE epidemic, and a consequent outbreak of CJD, was significant, owing to the widespread practice of adding “rendered” animal parts—consisting of the ground-up tissues and bones of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, birds, and other animals—into cattle feed as a cheap source of protein. Alarmed, Winfrey asked her audience, “Now, doesn’t that concern you all a little bit right there, hearing that? It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger. I’m stopped.”
…After the jury decided in her favor on February 28, 1998, Winfrey emerged from the courthouse in Amarillo and declared to a national television audience, “Free speech not only lives, it rocks!” Although the outcome was surely a victory for free speech, it was legally not as consequential as most of her audience assumed. Because the Texas food-disparagement law was judged to not apply to the case (despite the best efforts of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, cattle were deemed not sufficiently “perishable,” as the law requires), the law was unaffected by the ruling, though there were later some unsuccessful attempts in the Texas state legislature to repeal it. In this respect the “Oprah case” was not a total loss for the plaintiffs or for the agriculture and food industries generally. Indeed, it was arguably a considerable benefit to them, because it usefully demonstrated to a wide audience that anyone who questioned the safety of a perishable food product in a public forum could face ruinously expensive litigation.
That is often the point of such lawsuits brought by big industries, to serve as a warning to those who do not have as deep pockets as Winfrey that they had better not challenge them.
You can be sure that even if it is decisively shown that lab-grown meat is more healthy, cheaper, and better for the planet than that obtained from animals, it will still face a lot of obstacles in the US before it becomes the default choice for meat-eaters.
In ‘Saying NO to a farm-free future’ small farmer Chris Smaje has shown lab grown meat just wastes a lot of electricity and does not solve any of the problems facing humanity.
#1 Venaktaraman
Por que no los dos?
Humans do a lot of energy-wasting things for moral reasons. Humans can do two things at once. We can reduce the harm electricity generation causes, AND we can treat animals more humanely. At the same time!
Now, I’m not wholeheartedly giving kudos to Meatly. I’m lazy. Most people are. So I have done no research because the odds of it affecting me are small. Amino acids, which are what they are feeding these cultures, are most easily gotten from animal sources.
I hope one day we can get the necessary amino acids from GM bacteria, fungi or algae -at competitive cost- because CRISPR is a game-changer that really alters what is possible.
Then we can provide (at first) pet food and (later) human food. I certainly want to abolish the horror that the chicken “farms” are.
Small farms that depend on delivering meat should have economic support to switch to other agriculture.
Big agribusiness can bloody well go bankrupt, their practices are among other things causing the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
I always find this argument against meat to be very, very spurious, especially if given the “let’s not eat meat to protect the environment” angle.
Firstly, pastures can be (and in my country often are) lands unsuitable for growing crops for direct human consumption. For example, grass can grow at higher elevations and on poor-quality soils. Converting 10% grass into human-edible cow meat and dairy products is still better than having 100% grass that is not human-edible at all.
Secondly, an adequately populated pasture is biodiverse and a veritable haven for many insect and plant species. Pasture biodiversity can be higher than that of a land left to its own devices.
Thirdly pastures are more resilient against both wind and water erosion and droughts than fields, reducing topsoil loss. Remember Dust Bowl?
Fourthly, pastures can be carbon-negative. Cows do not and cannot add carbon to the atmosphere, neither in CO2 nor methane. At the very worst, they convert some tiny portion of atmospheric CO2 into methane. And this methane produced by cows is a minuscule problem compared to fossil fuel burning. Until we solve the fossil fuel problem, it is nothing more than a red herring.
That does not of course mean that all pastures are equal and all are good. There are pastures on lands where a forest should be, and pastures where crops fit for human consumption can be grown, there are areas that suffer from overgrazing, etc. There are many valid environmental arguments for drastically reducing meat and dairy consumption and the amount of cattle that we grow. But IMO the arguments should be about where and how to graze, not whether to graze. There are whole natural ecosystems that are entirely dependent on grazing and when we need to feed 8 billion people, I see no problem with having cattle on some of them with humans as predators, instead of bison/deer and wolves.
Heh--speaking of the Philippines; there’s currently a recall of meat shipped to the USA by the PI…they are not cleared to provide meat. Having lived in the PI, I get it--their practices tend toward the deplorable and a lot of their food is adulterated or produced under appalling conditions.
As for meat in the USA; I get my meat, eggs, and dairy from a farmer group who pasture their cows, pigs, and chickens, and slaughter chickens on-site. They have solar panels on the barns. I guarantee you they have a smaller carbon footprint than the average McMansion-living SUV driver.
As for lab-grown meat…it’s healthier than the franken-food fake meats that are such nutrition nightmares, but I’m not sure it’s responsible.
https://www.fao.org/4/i3253e/i3253e.pdf
The UK left the EU eight years ago.
Charly @5: The argument that pasture lands are unsuitable for food agriculture is irrelevant -- if we stop raising grazing animals for food we will not need to convert pasture land to agricultural uses. According to this (Our World in Data) the total land area needed to feed humans on a plant-based diet is less than the sum of land currently used to grow plant food for humans and the land used to grow plant food for animals. Instead of raising cows on pastures, we should be reintroducing a large variety of wild grazing animals, for a more diverse and robust ecosystem. The fact that Wild mammals make up only a few percent of the world’s mammals is both a total shame and an increased risk of environmental collapse.
@anat -- Good pasture needs ongoing management -- it’s not the same as just leaving it to nature. There are certain plants that will grow rapidly and crowd out a lot of biodiversity, but are grazed by very few animals because they taste nasty, or are mildly toxic. If you don’t keep them under control, you don’t get a lovely meadow full of wildflowers and insects and song birds, you end up with a scrubby piece of wasteland.
If you’ve got thin soil on top of a hill (as a lot of pasture land in Europe is), and don’t put in a water source for grazing animals, then wild mammals aren’t going to come and graze it for you. If you have sycamore or other trees with wind-dispersed seeds growing in hedges, you get small saplings sprouting up, and again end up with something that crowds out the biodiversity you’re trying to encourage.
And certainly in the UK (can’t speak for other places) there’s a lot of really significant archaeological sites preserved below ground on hills, because this was the land that wasn’t seen as economically viable to either develop or use industrial-scale farming equipment on. Tree roots are not great for archaeology, ploughing is not great for archaeology, woody scrub and the rabbits it encourages, again not great for archaeology, bracken, guess what? Really bad for destroying archaeology. But what is great for archaeology and biodiversity, and holding marginal thin soils on top of slopes whilst also gradually deepening those soils over time, and creating green areas year round that people can see from distances and hopefully walk in? Grazed and managed pasture and wood pasture. And while it’s probably fenced to stop sheep and cattle escaping (although sheep often seem to find a way through anyway), the fencing doesn’t stop deer or small wild animals getting it to graze it too.
But if the farmer can’t at least cover the costs of the time and effort needed to manage it as a strong, biodiverse ecosystem, all those lovely environmental benefits disappear. Either the farmer finds a way to intensify arable cultivation on that bit of land, or they sell it off for a house or 2 (if a developer thinks it would stand a chance of planning permission) plus lose some of their arable fields for roads, or in 15 years time they decide it’s turned into a fairly shabby patch of wood, with bare soil where nothing can grow underneath the canopy, so the best thing to do is to release a few pheasants in to it and invite people to come and shoot them.
A purely arable farmer won’t spend money on land that doesn’t gain them anything, and even the ones who don’t themselves have livestock will often have a contract to provide grazing land for a neighbour -- you get better soil quality if you occasionally put animals in to replace the nutrients that are pulled out by the crops grown there (and as well as reducing the need for chemical fertilisers, they also help to break up soil compaction caused by non-stop cultivation). If you can do mixed farming, you get slightly cheaper arable cultivation in addition to a small extra income from livestock farming, and this makes small farms financially viable.
Yes, it might be technically possible to concentrate food production on a smaller global land take by killing off all the livestock and industrialising even more heavily than is currently done, but it’s not going to have the environmental benefits you hope it will.
Sorry -- that didn’t look as long in the text box. I apologise (more concisely) for that wall of text!
[I hope you don’t mind but I added some paragraph breaks to make for easier reading. What you wrote was informative and I did not want people to not read it because of the forbidding appearance. If you would like me to go back to the original, please let me know. -- Mano]
[katybe, no worries. But perhaps paragraph breaks. Just hit enter twice]
@katybe, 9, thanks for the wall of text--it was still very readable.
Humans have been farming animals successfully for at least 10,000 years, and some farms have been operating successfully for centuries on well-managed lands that alternate animal and crop growth for the avoidance of pesticide- and petroleum-based fertilizer reasons you described above. That doesn’t seem to matter to militant vegetarians because the facts intrude into their circumscribed worldview.
In the USA, for the past 30-some years, there have been farms like Polyface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyface_Farm) that not only practice ecological diversity and humane farming, but teach it to others in huge groups. The farming coop group (several farmers, joined together to offer a variety of meats and dairy and eggs and plants) I buy my from is nowhere near Polyface Farm, but learned and follow the practices because it makes good financial sense as well as preserving the land in good condition for future generations.
One wonders how those wildflowers and insects and birds managed for the millions of years when there was no agriculture.
kaybe, oh no! If people can’t make a profit the world goes to hell! Just pay people to manage the land. With wild mammals. Including predators. (Tax the yacht owners and their friends)
@14, wow, those goalposts splintered from being whipped around so fast, and also, nice strawman you set up that nobody would ever keep an animal except to make a profit--for that matter, anyone who sells tomatoes in the local farmer’s market or has a front-yard stand with strawberries and corn is making a profit. Shouldn’t you be shaming them as well?
You really can’t stand it that the entire human history shows that animals can be raised responsibly on pasture and provide nutrition for humans and other animals alike. Do you picket family farms who keep a couple of sheep for wool and Easter lamb? Write nasty letters to the editor and Karen at council meetings about families who keep chickens coops in their backyards?
@anat #8, I am not arguing against this:
I interpret this quote as saying that grazing animals is inevitably an ineffective use of land that subtracts from better ways to produce human food.
That is a different argument than saying that we can feed humans without grazing animals and I do not see how the quote could be interpreted as such.
________________________________
@KG #13, before humans, there was a lot of megafauna around that kept the forests in check by breaking the canopy, grazing on grass and seedlings, etc. There aren’t very many mammoths, rhinoceroses, or irish elk around. Nor are there wild bison, aurochs, horses, and moose in Eurasia and North America in huge numbers any more. But notice that some of this ancient megafauna is now domesticated -- and their domesticated versions can, and in some areas do, fill the ecological niche their wild ancestors did.
And whilst it is desirable to work on preserving those species of wild megafauna that are not completely extinct yet, maybe even back-breeding aurochs, it is unrealistic and indeed impossible to bring them, and their predators, back in numbers sufficient enough to restore pre-human natural balance. We live in Anthropocene now, we have to deal with it.
@Kimpatsu8000, #7:
Ah, another one for the file of “bullshit disproveable by a three second google search”.
The UK had a referendum on EU membership 8 years ago. The Prime Minister who called that referendum was for remaining in, and when he lost, IMMEDIATELY resigned. The next PM tried and failed to get Britain to leave the EU on something like sensible terms, and called a general election to try to improve her mandate. She was got rid of because she failed and we were still in the EU. The next PM fought a general election on the ticket of “get Brexit done”, because by 2019 (i.e. five years ago) we still hadn’t.
Brexit officially took place at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020. We continued to participate in many EU institutions (including the single market and customs union) during an eleven-month transition period.
So yeah, we “left the EU 8 years ago”, but only if you don’t really know what literally any of those words mean.
13
Bison herds and wildfires were the native forces that impact the prairies in North America.
——
Pasture land is land that is unsuitable to growing crops due to:
Erosion
Rocks
Lack of rainfall
Poor soil
Using that pasture land for animals is a sustainable farming practice. Cattle eat grass and provide both meat, and dairy products. While it may be technically correct to claim that it takes more land to grow food to feed the animals than it would to grow crops for human food, it’s not true in terms of practicality.
Those cattle ranches aren’t going to transform from arid grassland to fertile cropland.
Thanks for the paragraph breaks, Mano -- very much appreciated.
@KG -- 13 -- Other people already talked about megafauna and forests but the climate was also quite different, and the plants, insects and birds were in different places. As people adopted agriculture and cleared pastures, species moved into new areas and adapted to different conditions. If you turn pastures into different habitats, that doesn’t automatically mean that the existing species there will be happy, or that the ‘right’ species will immediately turn up.
One problem we’ve been getting is that species became rarer when arable farming intensfied and industrialised post-war, because patches of habitat didn’t connect. Quite a lot of the farming subsidies from the EU and UK pots in the last 20 years have gone towards trying to expand and join these habitats with hedges and field margins. Plus most of the things we think of as wildflowers are growing where they are because someone threw some seeds around to try and actively encourage them.
@anat -- 14 -- I think we’re talking about very different farming businesses. Most farmers are not wealthy, and certainly not yacht owners -- most farmers are stumbling along on the verge of going broke. It is possible, just about, to make enough money to attract shareholders if you buy up huge tracts of land, strip out all the hedges and fences, and industrialise everything you possibly can, whilst employing people to work cheaply in poor conditions. But in farming that way, you’re stripping nutrients from the soil, obliterating as much natural biodiversity as possible, including your insect pollinators, and leaving yourself very open to disease rapidly spreading.
From what I understand, that is how a not insignificant amount of farming gets done in the centre of the US, with big businesses (although I have no local knowledge of US systems), but that level of industrialisation works poorly for small farmers -- the equipment is too expensive to buy and run, and monoculture farming gets more expensive all the time because you’re constantly having to do more to keep the overall yield the same. The collective Katydid knows may not be able to bring in enough money to afford to have a bunch of corporate shareholders scrape off all their profits in farming like that, but they can make different parts of their farms work together to minimise the huge sums of capital they would need to industrialise.
If you only grow wheat, or any other single crop, soil quality deteriorates and you’re really vulnerable to the wrong weather at the wrong time, so you can easily lose a year of profits -- it’s only big industrial corporations that can afford that risk -- whereas if you’re a livestock farmer who doesn’t grow at least some of their feed, you have a massive ongoing cost. Here in the UK, most sheep and cows are kept outside freely grazing and fertilising pasture fields (cows may come in overnight, sheep only rarely, and usually in relation to lambing). When the main summer crop is harvested, the farmer can just about get a winter root vegetable into the same field, but turnips and beets aren’t particularly popular for people to eat here. However, if you stick the livestock in there when the pastures are getting too bare in the winter, they’ll eat all the leaves, then you can plough the tubors up and the stock eat them, whilst also breaking up and fertilising the ground ready for the spring sowing of whatever above ground crop you plan to put in.
Most farmers around the world have small farms which just about sustain their families, and can only keep going by maximising every possible bit of land. Mixed farming makes that farm less vulnerable to climate change, less reliant on petrochemicals, less reliant on cheap migrant labour and dangerous working conditions.
And yes, in Europe and the UK we actually have been paying farmers to manage the land in environmentally sustainable ways! Part of that is identifying which parcels of land are in fact better suited to grazing and making sure that farmers put the right animals and the right numbers of them into the right places at the right time. I remember tabloid press headlines talking about the EU subsidies being to pay farmers “not to farm”. I’m not a farmer, I’m an archaeologist -- it wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I realised the journalists were describing arable farming as the only farming instead of explaining to people that sustainable farming comes with financial benefits to the farmer and gains for the natural and historic environment.
@ katybe, 19: I’m only passingly familiar with farming practices in the center of the USA based on what I’ve read and seen on tv, and yes, they are what gave rise to the Dust Bowl and tend to be huge corporate conglomerations that abuse their workers and focus on monocrops that ruin the soil.
Where I live, the farms tend to be smaller (a hundred acres or fewer, including a bunch of tiny family farms) and there’s a lot of crop rotation. As you described above, if you allow animals through the growing field, the cows drop manure, the chickens eat the worms and scatter the manure, and the pigs aerate the soil. All ready for planting. Sheep and goats deployed at the right time thrive on scrub that humans can’t eat. Chickens eat flies and other insects. And this is the way family farms have operated for hundreds of years.
For alternate income streams is the practice of farm shares: the community pays the farmer in the winter for shares of produce/eggs/dairy/cheese at time of harvest. The farmer gets their money upfront before having the big expenses, and if there’s a bad year, the farmer doesn’t go bankrupt. Some small family farmers sell at local farmers markets and some have farm stores--the coop I was talking about also sells homemade soaps and lotions, candles, baked goods, and skeins of yarn that some farms produce as alternate income streams. I’ve learned a lot about candle-making and soap-making from talking to the people who do these things because they’re right there when I’m browsing them.
Another money-making source is farmstays, where the public can pay to spend time on the farm, sometimes doing chores and sometimes as a B&B type of thing. Both my kids spent various weeks helping out on a local farm when they were too old for summer camps and old enough to be useful--it doesn’t take a degree in agriculture to let chickens out and back in for the night, collect eggs, make sure all the water buckets are full, and pull weeds. It also frees up the farmer to concentrate on more vital tasks.
Shannon Haynes is a farmer who has written about her sustainably-farmed home--I met her years ago when the farmer I buy my meats from hosted her for series of talks: http://theradicalhomemaker.net/meet-shannon/ She has a PhD in Sustainable Agriculture, which includes animals.
Hm. Such vague language!
How exactly do they get those “vitamins and amino acids”?
(I think I know, and it ain’t from combining base chemicals in some factory)
—
Again: trophic levels, which were referenced in the OP.
(And, um, the medium within which the cells are grown. It just magically appears, apparently!)
@John Morales; I’m also not comfortable with the vagueness of exactly how this all works, nor the round-the-clock use of electricity to keep all of this going.
Circling back, there’s a graphic I’ve seen that I’ve been trying to find. I can’t so I’ll describe it: it’s a cartoon of two people speaking. Panel 1: Person A says, “My religion says I can’t do that.” Person B says, “OK”. Panel 2: Person A says, “My religion says YOU can’t do that.” Person B says, “F*** off.”
Faith causes all kinds of hilarity when the adherents have it in a death-grip and resort to increasingly-silly arguments to try to make their point, oblivious to all the attempts of good people to show them their way might be good FOR THEM, but not as iron-clad PROOF YES PROOF that they believe it is. Usually the arguments boil down to, “The bible is true because it says it is!”
Well, the basics remain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
Also, addressing the idea that any plot of land anywhere can be used to grow food for humans is about as short-thinking as the fundies’ claim that the entire population of the USA can fit into the state of Texas, so therefore people should all be having 20 kids like the Duggars and other clowncar families.
Lots of land simply is not useful for growing crops that humans eat. Much of New England soil is thin and rocky, with sharp hills that don’t lend themselves to farming. The soil can support the nutritional needs of sheep and goats, but not humans. Likewise, The Herdy Shepherd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Rebanks) has written books about his native area, the Fells of north-west England. People have kept sheep for a thousand years on land too steep and ravined for a human to farm or even climb, so they have a millennium of experience in training sheepdogs to round up the sheep that graze the steep slopes.
katybe@19,
I was being somewhat facetious@13 -- I’m aware that issues of sustainability are complicated, but the vast majority of livestock farming worldwide is hugely destructive, and contributes considerably to greenhouse gas emissions. There’s no way sustainable livestock farming could produce anything like the amounts of meat and dairy currently consumed, let alone those projected for a few decades ahead.
John Morales @21: Yeast and bacteria can make an excess of so many things, including amino acids, vitamins, assorted phytochemicals, food coloring, even some plastics. Quite amazing critters. The wonders of fermentation plus genetics.
@KG, the vast majority of vegetable and fruit farming worldwide is hugely destructive, and contributes considerably to poisoned, depleted land from overuse of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The vast majority of clothing manufacturing worldwide is hugely destructive, and contributes considerably to greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of cellphone production worldwide is hugely destructive, and contributes considerably to pollution and strip-mining. The vast majority of oil extration worldwide is hugely destructive, and contributes considerably to any number of problems from groundwater poisoning to ground destabilization. The vast majority of housing development worldwide is hugely destructive, and contributes considerably to land deforestation and global warming.
So… the vast majority of everything that makes human life possible and tolerable is hugely destructive and contributes considerably to making the world other than it would be if there were no (or vastly fewer) humans in it.
So… let’s kill all (or most of) the humans. You start.
sonofrojblake, that is a really silly supposed implication.
Makes no difference, either way.
Heh.
[meta]
Gotta love it.
sonofrojblake cares not to dispute me, so he has bothered to put in an addon that disables comments from a selected set.
Basically, that set up means that I can dispute him, but he can never respond to my disputations.
(So cowardly!)
@29, who are you responding to?
KG made the (incorrect) assumption that everyone in the entire world raises meat animals in the absolute worst way. In fact, most of the world are small households that might have a few chickens and maybe some rabbits or guinea pigs or real pigs (depending on where in the world they are). I pointed out that a lot of things are being done in the worst way, yet not a peep about that.
There is a charity that’s operated around the world for more than a century. It’s called Heifer International. When I was in high school several decades ago, I did a summer internship with them. In the devastation after WWI, they formed to provide livestock and instruction on animal husbandry to households in need around the world. Depending on the culture and their environment, they might provide a flock of ducks or chickens, or pigs, rabbits, goats…all the way up to a water buffalo (farming and milk). They also provide bees and instructions on bee-keeping, fruit trees, and other things. In the past few years, they’ve been providing stoves that run on the biogas from animal manure--providing a clean way to cook that doesn’t require wood or gasoline.
Having a single goat that can eat weeds and other greenery that people can’t, and turns it into milk and meat is a great luxury for the average world household.
Katydid @#32,
I’m glad that you gave a shout out to Heifer International. It does very good work.
Katydid@28,
Nice bit of whataboutery! People need to eat, be clothed, have shelter and power. They don’t need to eat meat or dairy, at least in anythnig like the quantities now consumed.
But that does not account for most of the animals raised for food, does it? The great majority of those are raised by agribusiness, and fed either extensively on deforested land, or intensively on crops such as soya.
Not on this particular thread, because they are less relevant to the topic. If you haven’t seen the vast amounts written about the things you listed @28, it’s because you haven’t looked. And whataboutery is almost always a sign that the whataboutist knows they are defending the indefensible.
@KG, you are engaging in whataboutery too. Some people point out that there are environmentally friendly ways to grow animals for food, and you are all about pointing “whatabout those factory farmed animals!”. I, and I suspect Katydid too, do not condone factory farming and I have for example expressly stated:
So why are you insisting on talking about bad husbandry practices when someone points out there are good ones too?
_________________
The same arguments you are using can be thrown right back at you, which is what Katydid did and you completely missed the point:
People do need clothes, they certainly do not need to go through several sets of clothes every few months. The great majority of those clothes are made from petrochemicals that end up in landfills or from cotton grown in unsustainable ways depleting fresh water faster than it can be generated.
People need power but they do not need so much of it all the time and most people could cut some power use. The great majority of that power is generated by burning fossil fuels which are the leading cause of climate change.
People need shelter but they do not need sprawling culdesac suburbs in poorly isolated houses where what surfaces are not paved over are covered with sterile monoculture lawns. The vast majority of those houses have to run AC all the time because they are poorly insulated and the paved surfaces increase surface temperature significantly, whilst the lawns needlessly deplete fresh water fit for human consumption.
_________________
You see, the issue that I argue (and I suspect others too, although I cannot speak with certainty for anyone else) is that from an environmental point of view growing meat for human consumption is not a black-and-white issue but a complex one. We do need to move towards sustainable everything -- food production, power production, consumable goods production.
Going vegan is a personal choice and everyone is free to make that choice and make the world better that way if they can. But on a systemic level, forcing everyone to go vegan is not an option and it would not work economically and environmentally anyway. On a systemic level, we need laws and regulations that promote sustainability across the spectrum.
An anecdote to top it off: A few years ago the EU enacted laws and regulations that made it illegal to grow laying hens in confined cages. There was a huge furor that it would raise the price of eggs but EU enacted it anyway. Now nobody thinks about the regulation anymore, the hens are better off and the legislators can -- and do -- work on other legislations that promote animal welfare and sustainable husbandry.
There is a long way to go, there are miss-steps along the way and an occasional step bakc, but progress is being made.