This land isn’t for you or me. It’s for the meat industry. | Almost half of the continental US is used for meat production. There’s something better we could do with it.
This land isn’t for you or me. It’s for the meat industry. | Almost half of the continental US is used for meat production. There’s something better we could do with it.
Almost half of the continental US is used for meat production. There’s something better we could do with it.
Unless fake or lab meat is cheaper or just as expensive, this won’t change. Except maybe if costs go higher than what is considered profitable.
Fake meat is cheaper, it's just not heavily, heavily, subsidized by your tax dollars.
There was a video from a rancher floating around in like 2020 where he talks about the meat industry. There are billions of dollars every single day flowing through the meat industry. It goes primarily to the processing facilities and they use it to create surplus and waste to drive the prices down before making huge orders. The process hurts everyone except the ultra-wealthy.
Bingo
Fake meat is already cheaper. We dont need lab meats. Beans, seitan, tofu, tempeh, tvp, etc.
All we need is to start serving exclusively plant based meals in schools, and almost all of the next generation will adopt it.
I can usually get ground beef cheaper per pound than I can get tofu. When they both on sale they're the same price at my store.
It's considerably cheaper in the UK, like half or a third of the price sometimes.
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
I agree, the meat industry should be nationalized along with agriculture and the energy sector.
More like taxed out of existence
Idk man, have you ever seen how poorly run government businesses like the DMV are?
Well when you try to run a service that is by definition unprofitable, "like a business," the only way to hit the financial metrics is to cut salary and headcount. This obviously leads to shitty service. That said in states like New York and Illinois the DMV is actually pretty well run, though the number of locations and hours of operation leaves something to be desired.
Most of the US is empty and fertile unlike other parts of the world, land use is not really the biggest issue with meat farming
Empty... to humans but not to native species that living there. Grazing still affects those ecosystems there. From the article
As the cattle graze, they tend to disrupt ecosystems and do a lot of damage to the land. They eat or destroy plants consumed by native species, like turtles, which can lead to biodiversity loss. Their manure pollutes rivers and streams, and as they move about, they erode soil.
[...] analyzed decades of BLM data and found that about half of the acreage it oversees that has been assessed fails to meet the agency’s own land health standards (in Nevada, it’s an alarming 83 percent). PEER points to livestock grazing as the primary source of land degradation.
There's an opportunity cost in using all that land. If we let land go back to its natural state we can sequester quite large amounts of carbon
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
Sounds like you didn't even read the first paragraph of the article
Although the article talks about biodiversity, people may have other concerns and i thought i would note them
Theme parks? Meat-themed theme parks!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The problems are huge, sprawling, and major,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project (WWP), the group that sued numerous federal agencies for failing to preserve the habitat of the Mojave desert tortoise and 77 other species.
WWP alleges that for decades, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other agencies have violated an agreement they signed in 2001 that forbids cattle grazing in a part of Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument in order to protect the desert tortoise, whose population has plunged since the 1980s.
The permitting program is costing the federal government tens of millions of dollars annually to administer, all while giving cattle ranchers a deep discount on public lands.
Even worse, the federal government spends millions annually on its “Wildlife Services” division, which kills wild animals it deems a threat to grazing livestock.
The programs that subsidize the beef industry represent some of the most striking examples of America’s tradition of “agricultural exceptionalism” — giving farmers and ranchers special treatment, like sweeping exemptions from critical environmental, labor, and animal welfare laws.
Agribusiness also benefits from getting large swathes of the West to itself, illustrating a simple fact of land use in America: Contrary to the famous Woody Guthrie song, much of it isn’t for you and me — it’s for the meat industry.
The original article contains 1,123 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The autotldr isn't great here, focusing on one example and missing quotes about the broader picture like these:
All told, a staggering 41 percent of land in the continental US is used for meat, dairy, and egg production. Globally, it’s more than one-third of habitable land. Much of it was once forest that’s since been cut down to graze livestock and grow the corn and soy that feeds them.
not all agriculture is equally land-intensive. Meat-heavy diets require far more land than low-meat and vegetarian diets.
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere.
Because America is so short of land...
High land use harm native species and has great environmental consequences as described in the article
There's more to consider than just how much land is available to humans
What a stupid and annoying title, trying to imply that I am on some team that is not the "meat industry" team. I eat meat and I have nothing against ranching.
What?
basically everyone eats meat. If it's making meat it's broadly serving the people.
Deforestation is not serving the people
High GHG emissions is not serving the people
High cruelty to non-human animals is not serving the people
Etc.
Yes. It is. This meat isn't going into dumpsters. It's largely sold and people love the cheap prices and do not care about any of that in mass
basically everyone is experiencing record heat waves every summer now
Yeah, and neither deforestation nor meat make a dent in that. If you want to end global warming, end the use of fossil fuels.
The statistics they parrot about nothing emissions are largely bullshit and even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow we'd still have all the same problems we do now.
You can't offset global warming with forests, what humans are doing is an order of magnitude larger than what nature is equipped to handle.
Nor is this even relevant at all, because even fossil fuels serve the average person. There's a reason we keep using them.
Well, strictly speaking, it is mostly serving the unhealthy, obese part of the population.
I think in a few years of Ozempic, meat consumption will drastically reduce, along with other less healthy foods.
That will probably free up quite a lot of land.
Someone hasn't heard of Buddhism or India