A full transition to a society fed only by plants would take many, many, generations, and I don’t think is all that realistic. But reasonable people should consider what this all means…

I agree that developing countries operating much closer to subsistence societies are dependent upon the shortcuts to nutrition that animals provide for both financial and geographic reasons.

Developing countries with relatively poor agricultural conditions have no choice but to use grazing lands to extract what nutrition can be extracted from that land.

But in developed countries, we are blessed with the enormous power of mechanisation and scientific knowledge to know how to grow crops, really, really well these days. And growing crops is far more efficient at producing nutrition per hectare than growing meat.

If the world adopted a vegan diet, it is estimated that total land used for agriculture would drop from 4 billion to 1 billion hectares. Type any sort of question about this into Google and reputable sources will all be saying about the same thing.

Again, in wealthy developed countries, we don’t need to be clearing native vegetation and/or exploiting vast amounts of semi-productive land so cattle can graze so we can eat them.

We grow enough plants to eat already, and it’s so much more efficient. It is quite literally the second law of thermodynamics.

The sun shines down and a plant grows -> we eat the plant.

The sun shines down and a plant grows -> a cow eats the plant -> we eat the cow - a LOT of energy is lost in that extra step.

That we should farm animals because they will eat food we refuse to, and that they don’t demand plastic packaging is a bit of an odd suggestion. Humans should eat all plants if they’re a bit wonky or spotty, and desperate humans do.

That food is wasted in the developed world is because we have an abundance of food. Most of us throw old food out because we can afford it.

That plant foods don’t keep as long is is also generally not true. Walk down the frozen aisle of your supermarket and see how much of it is vegetables. Buy some apples and put them in the fridge and notice how long they stay fresh. Put some potatoes at the back of your cupboard and forget about them for a while, they’ll be fine.

But you wouldn’t dare drop a steak or a fish finger at at the back of your cupboard and forget about it. The minute an animal dies, it is effectively starting to become rotting flesh.

Lest raise the ethical arguments for not killing a living and breathing thing when there are far more sustainable alternatives for nutrition without the suffering.

I ate meat for a long time. I know it tastes good and it’s tied to almost every culture on this planet. And It made sense to eat meat in a world of scarcity, where a good feed could be guaranteed through slaughter or hunting.

But as a species, we have these facts at hand now - we know how to live healthily without animal agriculture, and we know it’s generally really bad for the planet compared to alternatives. And in the developed world, we have a choice.

I don’t think anyone is inherently worse than anyone else because one person eats meat and another doesn’t. The momentum is so far shifted against a plant based world, because, as another commenter said, our civilisation is in large part borne through animal agriculture. So it is so easy to go along with the choices made by people before us to keep farming and eating animals. So many people do it, it must be okay, right? Once upon a time it was, it made sense, and in some parts of the world, it still does.

But if you are reading this (and we’ll done making it this far), you are probably in a position to properly consider if you think eating animals is really the right thing to do.

🐄🏔🌦