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Why the focus on "efficiency" with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don't want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
I just don't understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some "they" is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but....?
I'm sure the alex jones crew bring it up all the time when talking about the secret global conspiracy or whatever, but I bring it up because bugs are a legitimate food source. One that is extremely efficient in terms of both resources and space, but just because eating bugs is more "efficient" then eating beef, doesn't mean that we should all eat bugs. Generally this is uncontroversial, but some environmentalists dismiss food culture and variety of diets amongst humans in pursuit of maximizing some other metric but they aren't very clear on what their goals are, let alone the why.
This is not some trivial difference. I talk about efficiency because we're talking about substantial portions of entire global resources. The difference is many order of magnitudes between any animal products and plants. It's enough to change the entire environment of our planet
I think that deserves far more weight than "culture". Because something is tradition is no good reason to keep doing something
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
And that land for instance can come from places like the Amazon rainforest
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/unsustainable_cattle_ranching/
Forbid food exports, problem solved. Americans can grow their own food and enjoy their own burgers on their own land just fine.
This is not a problem of exports. The US eats way animal products more per capita. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world's habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn't even be enough
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-global-habitable-land-needed-for-agriculture-if-everyone-had-the-diet-of
The land usage itself isn't free either. It comes with costs
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
And that's not to mention the emissions which are enough to make us miss climate targets on their own if we ignore them. We must address fossil fuels and animal agriculture
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
since fossil fuel emissions are unlikely to be eliminated entirely, the food system isn't exactly the issue. it's still fossil fuels.
your ourworldindata link relies heavily on poore-nemecek, a paper I don't trust at all. do you have another source?
We can look at individual foods themselves
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/
We can look at other modeling studies. Here's a review of modeling studies
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0165797&emulatemode=2
We can also look at some specific modeling studies in specific countries. Numbers will slightly different from global picture since it is going to vary based on how much animal products are consumed there
For instance, here's one looking at France in particular
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352550919304920
Here's another study modeling for Romania in particular (though does indirectly use some from numbers from Poore, Nemecek). Romania consumes roughly half per capita as somewhere like the US and still sees quite high reductions with removing all animal products
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11722955/
this is exactly my problem with poore-nemecek 2018. this analysis, unlike poore-nemecek, admits that it's a major gap in the methodology, but still suffers from this gap.
i don't have acces to the full text of your third paper. can you provide it?
the actual data isn't exposed in this link. do you have the full paper?