threeplusfire | (no subject)

(no subject)

I shouldn't read the internet so soon after waking. It only pisses me off.

Fuck that vegan moral superiority bullshit. There's something delightfully evil about knowing that in order to sustain large crops of grains you end up with a lot of dead field mice. Oh, I am so going to use that line on the next self righteous vegan who tries to make me feel guilty for eating meat.

Thankfully my friends who are vegetarian/vegan/whatever who are not militant about their choices and don't feel the need to run around trying to guilt others into adopting their behaviour. I will kindly eat their share of the world's meat so they won't have to. Everyone wins!

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Most livestock live on land that wouldn't be able to produce edible crops for humans.

This is because most livestock live in factory farms. Can't grow too many vegetables on concrete. And while it may be true that, in mountainous regions, you can raise cows but few crops, most American beef cows, even free-range ones, only get so much of their daily food intake from actually grazing. Usually, what happens is people grow feed-grain crops, harvest them with the normal machine methods, and then ship them off to the cattle farm.

And while some waste vegetable matter is actually fed to cows, really, you can't just feed cows on stuff that humans won't eat, they need the grains for protein. And even if cows are 400% more efficient at eating corn than humans are, there is still some waste due to the increased trophic level.

This is why, for example, people in most historical agrarian societies ate meat very, very rarely. Eating dairy or plants was just more efficient, and it was expensive to feed a cow or pig. You only see people eating highly meat-based diets when they're living in an area, like mountains or semi-arid regions, where really the only things that grow are grasses. And those cattle live very different lives than your average American beef cow.

I think you missed the point there. A lot of land used to support livestock isn't as usable for growing crops. My grandfather's family had large ranches and some of that land just wasn't condusive to growing corn or cotton, so it went to the beasties.

I don't know squat about raising cows, but my impression is that most cows are fed at least some grain (grown in traditional mouse-cidal ways), even ones on large ranches. I'd be curious to see what percentage of the cows we eat are raised completely without human-grown supplements to their diet (grain, hay, etc) but are totally pasture-fed.

Not that I'm veggie; I'm apparently what the accursed marketing guys call a 'flexitarian', which is to vegetarians what metrosexual is to queers I guess. I tend to eat veggie more often than not. I still like a good MLT when the mutton is nice and lean, though, on occasion.

It's not an issue of land, it's an issue of feed. The land that livestock live on usually doesn't feed them alone. People grow feed corn, harvest it in the same mouse-killing way as normal corn is harvested, and then feed it to the cows- after all, if the land isn't very green, the cows usually aren't going to be able to subsist entirely off of it. So where the cows actually live isn't an issue, the issue is that if corn-growing somehow kills animals, cow-growing will kill animals too, because you need to grow corn in order to feed those cows.

Well then we come to a point where the arguments are all moot. No matter what you're eating, something's got to give.

Yeah, basically.

I guess it all comes down to a certain hierarchy in terms of which things required the most amount of killing to eat, with factory-farmed and grain-fed cattle at the top (since you have to machine-harvest a lot of plants to raise them), vegetable matter somewhere near the middle, and entirely pasture-fed cattle somewhere near the bottom. The only problem with exclusively pasture-fed cattle is that you can't really grow too many of them, since they need to be raised in a warm region and each one needs a lot of land.

This is why, for example, people in most historical agrarian societies ate meat very, very rarely. Eating dairy or plants was just more efficient, and it was expensive to feed a cow or pig.

I don't disagree that eating meat is more costly than eating grain. I'm just pointing out that it isn't all opportunity cost -- it's not that the same resources could be used to produce vegetable foods. At least historically, much of civilization has banned consuming animals that compete with humans for food..... recall the two Biblical rules for mammals to be kosher: they must have a cloven hoof and they must chew the cud. These are purely practical considerations. The first requirement is that the animal have a utilitarian purpose as well (that it can be used as a beast of burden, in particular), while the second requirement is that the animal must feed on something that humans can't digest. People have always relied on meat for part of their diet, and they've tried to do it in a way that minimizes the trade-off between producing different types of food. (Pigs, in contrast to goats and sheep and cattle, eat the same kinds of things that people do -- so they're banned as an impractical food source.)

Admittedly, cattle are raised in different ways and for different reasons today..... but it's simply not true that for each pound of meat you have, you could instead have x pounds of vegetable foods.

You can not agree if you want, but it's just objectively true that meat was more costly than grain throughout much of history, except in areas that were really hostile to agriculture. Meat was considered a luxury, which is why, for example, Catholics often gave/give it up for Lent.

Also, I never said that for every pound of meat you raise, you could have instead x pounds of human-edible vegetable foods. What I was saying was that if you raise cattle in a way even remotely similar to how they're usually raised now, you need to harvest a lot of vegetable matter in order to feed them, a lot more vegetable matter than you'd need to harvest in order to have a good deal of grain. And that vegetable matter is not just scraps from stuff people already harvest to eat themselves- there are whole crops of corn that are grown and harvested exclusively to feed cattle, and I know this because there are different safety standards for growing feed corn and corn for human consumption (for instance, feed corn can be genetically engineered in different ways) and there have been huge recalls when corn intended for cattle feed has gotten into the human food supply, and people have actually died (mainly of allergic reactions, since that corn produces different proteins).

Cattle are almost never entirely pasture-fed - they almost always eat a huge amount of corn and hay that was harvested using mouse-killing threshing machines. And they always will, because a) this is a far more efficient way to raise cows from the pov of the cattle ranchers, and b) most cattle-raising regions have what we call a "winter" season, during which time cattle can't live on their own terribly well, and need to be fed on hay and other grains that were harvested during the summer.

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