this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Its not actually sustainable for the whole planet. Meat farming, particularly beef, is terrible for the environment.
Not to mention the already dubious state of meat production in the US, the country with the highest consumption of meat. I don't think these issues would be solved with everyone on an all meat diet. Obviously they'd worsen.
I'm glad its working for you, but consider the larger implications of 7 billion people going all meat. Or even just the entirety of the US.
The current methods of farming, both animal and plants, needs to change to a sustainable regenerative model. Any system that requires external inputs (especially petrochemical inputs) wont work long term. Plants and animals work together to regenerate topsoil and are essential to the biocycle.
Great point, I'm glad you brought it up! Let's examine this.
Remember when people adopt a strict keto / carnivore lifestyle, they are not mindlessly snacking all the time, eating becomes intentional, people simply eat less (and no need for grains).
For the average adult male (lets assume all 7 billion people are males for simplicity) - they require about 500g of animal food per day (after adapting to a fat based metabolism) - don't forget most of the energy on a carnivore diet comes from fat, most of which we throw away now, so that is extra yield per animal)
Given that the current world fishing capture feeds 1 billion carnivores annually.
and Current world meat production could feed about 2 billion carnivores annually.
There is a gap in current production (3billion vs 7 billion), but the health of the people depends on closing this gap (more focus on range land, de-vilifying animal nutrition). Right now we are not prioritizing meat production and people's health is suffering, I hope we can rectify that.
Also worth noting that the majority of the worlds vegetarians are economic vegetarians (they don't have access to animal foods). But that speaks to a historical trend - the rich and elite eat meat, and the peasants eat plants (i.e. robin hood's Sherwood forest).... which is just another spin on economic vegetarians
This -
Cannot be reconciled with this. The difference in land use is absolutely insurmountable. What you're suggesting would require turning every scrap of undeveloped, farmable land into farmland. We would have no wilderness left.
That ignoring the huge flaw in your fishing calculation. Global fish populations are plummeting. Harvesting so much is also wildly unsustainable and the entire fishing industry is headed for collapse if we don't reign in how much we collect every year.
There are a lot of things 'the rich' have done through history that should not be used as a model of how we should structure our society.
Right I admit there is lots of work to be done to close the gap. Getting people in the west onto whole food diets is probably the most helpful in the short term, Getting people in the global south off processed foods and some animal proteins (especially in childhood) would also have a huge outsized impacted.
If we can't get the whole world carnivore, we should at least try to get them keto, and if we can't do keto, we should try for low carb.
That's where we fully agree, whole foods and low carb are absolutely the way to go!
Industrial agriculture in all its forms, including monocrop agriculture, is terrible for the environment.
"The environment" in and of itself is more complex than just emissions. Things like the water cycle and latent heat have to be considered too. Look at sustainable and regenerative farms. Ruminants regenerate the topsoil, irrigate ground naturally, and sequester carbon in the soil. This offsets their methane emissions. Also soil health and biodiversity in particular, I suspect, is something that we don't care about enough.
FWIW, I've been learning about how to become a regenerative farmer. There's a lot of learn about in terms of how one can contribute to the good of society by improving the environment around oneself. By looking for a plot for a farm, I've learned that there are laws here for land that can be used to farm crops, and land that cannot. A lot of that land can however support grazing animals.
On an aside, on the topic of "meat farming" vs plants, we should also consider essential amino acid yield and nutrient density when doing environmental impact assessments, and not just crude protein yield. Otherwise it's not really a fair comparison.
You're optimistic but wildly ignorant of the scale of the problem. If we were to switch to open grazing for ethical meat production, just supporting the current US population at current meat consumption rates would require essentially every scrap of undeveloped land and absolutely destroy our ecosystem. It's not possible.
Monoculture is a problem, but meat production is 30x more damaging than even the most damaging monoculture plant farms. The sheer amount of energy needed to grow a cow is incredible, that animal is only getting about 10% efficiency out of its food. You can feed a dozen people on the farmland needed to raise one cow.
That's not to say nobody should be eating meat, it's still an important component of regenerative farming. But for it to actually be sustainable long term, we really need to tone it down and accept that meat should cost a whole hell of a lot more than it does.
Doubt I'm gonna make any friends here though, sorry y'all!
Naw, we love you! Keep asking the hard questions.
What came to mind when I read this is a question: how are we getting more efficiency out of eating plants than ruminants are, when they are animals that have expressly developed over eons to do so?
You shouldn't belittle people on the internet, especially since you don't know me very well at all. But we are civil here, so I'm going to let that pass :)
I understand that you think it's not possible.
Even considering usage of pesticides, chemicals, and the loss of topsoil and biodiversity? It is estimated that we only have 90 harvests or so remaining. What happens then?
We aren't, that's just a general trend in biology. On average, consumers only receive about 10% of the energy that goes into growing the organism they eat. To be clear, I'm not saying the consumer is getting on 10% of the nutrition they eat, but that the amount of energy in the food when it's eaten is only about 10% of the total energy that organism needed to grow.
That's a fair call-out, I'll do better.
All of these things are worse with farming animals. 60% of the cropland in the US goes to feeding cattle. Those cattle proved a tenth of the nutrition that that cropland could produce otherwise. Eliminating cattle farming would double our available cropland and make regenerative farming practices actually possible.
To be clear, I certainly don't think cattle farming needs to be eliminated, it's just not feasible to be such a massive part of our diet.
In the US. Assuming you're from there, and I believe perhaps partially because there are a lot of other things on your mind right now that its common in discussions that Americans assume that what is true in the US is also true in the rest of the world. Perhaps it's a good gentle reminder that it is not always the case.
Yes, eliminating animal husbandry would be a very shortsighted move, indeed. Again, we really should be looking at nutrient density and essential amino acid yields and factoring that into environmental impact.