wasabichan
AChocolateMouse
I am saying that there is nothing morally superior about being a vegetarian. It's not a problem I have with vegetarians; be vegetarian. I don't care. But don't pretend it's because it reduces cruelty because animals raised for eggs and dairy live bad lives.
Yeah ok, I see what you're getting at. Problem is - there's more than one reason to be vegetarian and most of them have their separate moral reasoning.
Anyway, egg hens, even from supposedly ecological or "animal friendly" farms lead shitty lives. I'm not going to disagree with you there. Unless you've got a line into some really tiny local producer eggs come at a steep price for the hen. That's why I avoid them most of the time. In the end I do value my own well-being over that of the hen, hence my occasional egg intake. Milk production on the other hand doesn't need to be the cow hell it sometimes is.
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The food value you throw away comes from your natural fertilizer. Studies that show that vegetables are more productive on a per-acre scale are looking at raw numbers from factory farmed meat VS factory farmed vegetables such as corn and soybean. These numbers come without the additional factors of the thousands of pounds of chemicals poured on the land two of every four years that are produced using fossil fuels and water fracking and are completely unsustainable. There are also studies that show using a 5-year crop rotation of grain, legume, vegetables, forage(IE grass) and ruminants (cows, sheep, goats, often in conjunction with chickens) produces the SAME amount of vegetable food by giving the land a break through growing forage and renewing it with amazing fertilizer provided by the animals.
But you now have a by-product of animals that you HAVE to take into account. 1/5th of a farmer's land will go to these animals at all times making them grow, breed and eventually die.
Now if you make these animals dairy cows/goats, egg chickens and wool sheep then you have a vegetarian lifestyle that could be potentially supported.
But you also have the food value of the animals themselves. All the animals die eventually anyhow. If you are a responsible omnivore, part of your food is a small portion of meat that comes from these animals when they get older and stop being very productive. This food is high in value, lots of vitamins and calories.
If you DON'T eat meat then you need to make up these calories and proteins other ways. A plate of food that is all vegetarian needs a lot more on it to sustain a human than a plate with even a few ounces of beef. Just look at how many calories 5oz of beef has and try to figure that in lbs of carrots. It's MASSIVE. Which means that if a society wants to take on the most sustainable way of growing we know of WITHOUT eating meat you must grow a lot MORE vegetables/grains to make up the difference. Which means clearing even more land and depriving wild animals of natural resources to maintain the same population. This gets way worse with a vegan-only mindset when you don't even get the food value of eggs and dairy.
Now if 1/8th(ish because ratios aren't exact here depending on what animals are grown some would give better meat ratios) of your food comes from meat then that means 1/8th less space needs to be dedicated to growing your food. And when we're talking large numbers of people that makes a big difference.
Now I'm not saying that someday we might not be able to magically manufacture vegetables freely in a lab and veggie farming will get SO efficient it outstrips even the need for conventional farming. But until we no longer need to fertilize the ground, the most natural and lowest-impact way to do that is by raising meat animals too. :3 And by eating those animals we reduce the amount of total space we need to dedicate to food, thereby allowing forests and natural landscapes to come back.
Wait - are you now saying meat takes
less land and resources to produce than crops? Because that's just not the case.
This source has one of the lower estimates I've seen and they're still saying cutting meat out of the equation means better sustainability.
Gosh no! Re-read what I wrote!
Actually that is the exact type of study I was referring to as being biased and wrong because their facts are off. Here;
http://blog.ucsusa.org/crop-rotation-generates-profits-without-pollution-or-what-agribusiness-doesnt-want-you-to-know/
Scientific study the above link references; (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047149)
http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/doc/integration/papers/integration_benefits.htm
This is what I am talking about. These are independent studies being done to try to reduce problems with current agriculture.
Current agriculture uses a four-year rotation. Corn-Soybean-Pesticides-Fertilizer. The pesticides and fertilizers are made using lots of fossil fuels and are heavy in chemicals that are unsustainable. This two-crop-two-chemical rotation causes soil degradation and erosion, meaning they need to pour in even MORE chemicals to fix it. THIS is the type of farming where those "uses less water etc" studies are coming from. Plant growing still uses less water in a 5-year rotation, but the important aspect of it is that the livestock is NEEDED for the fertilizer, and the forage crops that renew the land aren't able to be consumed by humans (as in clover or alfalfa) and are best suited to feeding livestock.
These are crop-rotations that use cattle or cattle manure as a fertilizer. One of the studies references that they use manure in a 4-year cycle, which means you could probably just add cows as a year in the cycle making it a 5-year cycle instead of shipping in manure.
And plants need their nutrients from SOMETHING. And cow, goat, sheep and chicken manure leaves behind LOTS of nutrients. Have you ever tried growing a plant in a pot with just water and sunlight, no mulch, compost, fertilizers, anything? A select few plants CAN grow like this, but not well and not veggies or grains... And certainly not to the degree we need them to. This is why my mom always keeps around a 2 liter of coca-cola to add to her water for her indoor plants. She has the biggest, healthiest most vibrant plants I have ever seen in a pot and they are all tropical (we live in Ohio) and hard to maintain. Some are a good 40 years old. She has palm trees growing in her dining room that have been cut down and re-rooted when they got too tall not once, but twice and are still alive. You can't do that without an intense form of plant food.
So to maximize production in a smaller space we can add chemicals or animals. Obviously chemicals are produces almost exclusively from fossil fuels and are unsustainable so we have to add animals. (At least until a third option comes around.)
So if you have a farm that is maximizing it's production it has animals as a by-product. If we eat the meat these animals produce, we reduce our need to intake vegetables which means the amount of land needed to GROW vegetables goes down. If a farm produces 1/8th of it's total product in animal meat as a byproduct of growing veggies and we eat it we use all the calories a farm can produce in a single space. And whether we eat the meat or not, the animals will die in the end because all life ends and something must be done with the carcasses.
But if we refuse to eat the meat then more space is needed to grow an additional 1/8th of our diet out of vegetables. A farm that can provide for 600 people on 80 acres with an omnivore diet needs to be 90 acres to provide for a vegetarian one. And if we go vegan and refuse to eat anything non-veggie that number goes up even more.
And this isn't even taking into account other natural by-products that can reduce fossil fuel use like leather hides, furs and wools that will reduce our need for synthetic fabrics and cotton fields.
So what I am saying is that if we use animals as an important form of fertilizer to get maximum-yields from a smaller space we should also eat those animals so be don't need even MORE space for even MORE plants and the animals to support it.
So if I get 500 calories a day from the meat that is a byproduct of growing veggies, then that's 500 calories of veggies a day that don't need to be grown.
Does that now make sense?
