General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Red meat plays vital role in diets, claims expert in fightback against veganism [View all]Farmer-Rick
(10,072 posts)Then drenching round up, pesticides, nitrogen, fungicides and using GMOs on millions of acres of fruit and vegetables. No scientific comparison with controls published in peer reviewed journals has ever been done. People have theories and estimates but no authentic scientific comparisons.
Yeah maybe too many cattle are raised. But what about rabbit and goat? Millions eat those meats routinely. Yeah New Zealand and Australia raise too much lamb. But what about pigs and chicken?
As you reduce the amount of meat available for consumption, how much more fruits and vegetables along with their chemical processing to make them ediable do you have to increase to compensate? Soy bean curd is not produced by simply cooking. Vegtable oil does not come in sufficient quantities to feed a family from a single acre of canola. Yet an acre will easily support 20 rabbits, 3 sheep or two pigs.
Rabbit and pigs can convert vegetable mass into fat and muscle mass in a surprisingly more efficient manner than humans or beef. I suspect the energy used to process one acre of canola into oil is more than the energy used by a pig to make 10 gallons of fat. I have seen studies that suggest this.....unfortunately it had not been experimentally studied.
So, considering all the animals in the world, the energy and poisons used to extract nutrition from vegetative matter (and mother nature does it through animals simpler and better than human processing) there is considerable argument about meat having a worse impact on the environment.