this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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[–] Hexamerous@hexbear.net 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You know what takes alot of water to produce. Meat.

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 38 points 2 months ago (1 children)

blaming "meat" is a heuristic that bypasses a critical understanding of agriculture and how it has mutated under capital into extractive, export-based monoculture plantations.

it's extractive plant production in climates unsuited ir no longer to plant production, it's land ripped from traditional communal management into intensive exploitation by the logic of markets. it's feedstocks, its single use plastics, its fast fashion, its irrigating from fossil water, its broken hydrologic cycles, its the so-called green revolution, its abstracting water faster than its recharge rates, it's production systems reliant on processes that comingle xenobiotics with water. its deforestation and desertification.

the whole planet could stop eating animal products tomorrow (and that would be great) but the cultural logic of capital would invent a new market for feedstocks (lets burn them for energy to power ai to find out where all the water is going!) and bend over backwards to keep their disposessing plantations in production because meat was just one of many bottomless holes for shoveling the products of industrial plant production into.

and the water-agriculture problem would continue to stare us all in the face.

[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 11 points 2 months ago

bend over backwards to keep their disposessing plantations in production because meat was just one of many bottomless holes for shoveling the products of industrial plant production into.

Case in point, the US subsidized corn to the point where even industrial beef production wasn't able to keep pace, so they started turning it into ethanol, even though the economics of it made no sense given the fossil fuel requirements needed to produce conventional corn. If it's not propping up demand for livestock, it's propping up demand for oil.