this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2022
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Well, a vegan diet is indeed less healthy than a balanced diet, but most people who follow such a diet don't do it for health. Farm animals are typically fed monocrops, and they are very inefficient at turning them into meat: eating an animal that fed on plants wastes an order of magnitude more amount of the plant than directly consuming it. They also produce greenhouse gases and contribute to antimicrobial resistance (which is a HUGE problem right now).
Hello, lets talk about these topics and try not to feel emotional. I am going to challenge some to all of these ideas but please do not take offense.
This is completely false, or I should say 80% false. Farm animals are fed the scraps. Cows for example are not fed corn meant for human consumption most of the time. They are fed the leaf part, which represents over 80% of the plant. Humans cannot eat the green part. They are fed many other scraps that we can't eat. They aren't competing with us for food.
Most cows are also fed grass most of their life. And they are extremely efficient and converting grass to meat.
It is only until their last few weeks that they are fed corn humans could eat to fatten them up. In Japan they are fed rice.
You can slaughter them without feeding them grains and that is a better solution than not eating them. We cannot eat grass. Cows can, if you don't eat cows you are wasting grass.
They produce methane, a very short lived greenhouse gas. Plants also produce methane. It was recently discovered that trees produce lots of methane,
You wouldn't say we need less trees would you?
In either case, you can feed cows seaweed and their methane production goes to almost zero.
The answer to antimicrobial resistance is to just stop feeding them antibiotics and allow them to eat grass as they are supposed to. Not eating meat is not helping. Instead people should buy meat produced in healthy ways.
Your own source says "Nobody is arguing that trees are therefore bad for climate and should be cut down. Indeed, in most cases, their carbon storage capability easily outweighs their methane emissions. "
Please tell me what about cow burps outweighs their methane emissions to make the comparison to trees sound.
Cows shit makes the ground so much more fertile the plants that grow where they live absorb so much carbon in balances out. Methane is a short lived greenhouse gas. Carbon a long lived. If you are worried about it you can also feed them seaweed.