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Animals suffer for meat production – and abattoir workers do too
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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Antiwork
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The entire industry is built on suffering. It's bad for the animals, the workers, the climate, your health.
I get a lot of downvotes for being vegan (and I'm usually being a prick about it, so - fair) but surely even the meat eaters must recognise that animal ag needs to scale way down to be at all sustainable. At the very least we need to stop subsidising it so it's cheaper than alternatives.
You want to stop subsidizing one of the best ways to provide food to people?....yeah that'll work out really well.
You know why governments subsidize farms? So we all don't starve.
Plant agriculture still exists?
Good luck planting plants in areas that cannot sustain them, where a large portion of animals grazy and are raised on.
Most farms don't grow food for humans to eat. You know this right? Like there is literally no way to sustain plant only eating for the whole country right now. It just isn't there.
We instead grow large amounts of crops that go to animal feed. It takes a lot less cropland for plant-based diets because we don't have to grow feed to another creature (who then will use up a large amount of that energy)
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
No we do not, I cannot stand this stupid regurgitated lie. You cannot eat the food they do. You cannot eat spoiled food, you cannot eat grass, you cannot eat roots and stalks, 85% of what they eat is from foraging...and you cannot grow crops on the mass majority of the land that they live on.
The water is even funnier, you cannot drink the water they do.
It still takes more human-edible crops in than it produces out
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Per unit crop land you can produce a lot more with plant-based production
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
For another study
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf
For water usage, it's also draining from places like the drying up Colorado river. We really don't want to use more water from that area at all
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
Let me say this again...we are not growing in any substantial way human edible food for just meat production. This is so wrong. I'll say it again...you cannot eat nor drink what livestock eat and drink. All of these "studies" love to leave that out. No one is going to stop eating meat, veganism is not something the majority of people can magically swap over to.
The first study's I cited in the previous comment whole goal was to directly measure what amount of their feed was human-edible. It still found it takes more kg of human-edible feed than it produces in kg of meat. These studies aren't leaving things out, they are just finding the opposite result
Repeating the claim without any evidence does not make it more true
https://lemmy.world/comment/9023734
Tired of repeating everything...read the thread. You're studies are biased crap, it's always some vegans that run the studies and it's always got a biased lean to make the studies sound like we can magically feed 7+ billion people on plants with no issues.
The very study that you cite found it uses more human-edible feed than it produces. That is the more relevant figure
That doesn't magically make it less nutritional than what it requires to feed them. 1lb of meat is not going to be replaced with 1lb of any veggies. You have to eat way more vegetables to get the same amount of nutritional value. Meat is packed with a higher concentration of most of the nutrients we need.
Do note I'm in no way saying it can replace vegetables, I like my greens, but I'm also not someone who thinks that we can magically feed the entire world on a plant diet.
That's what was assumed decades ago when those subsidies began. We know better now.
No, no it's not. All govs do this now so we don't end up with another famine. One bad year and farmers basically will go bankrupt and have to sell.
Hell go watch Clarkson farm if you want to actually learn something in a funny way.
I'm not starving and I don't eat meat. I just pay more for my food even though it costs less to produce. We should be incentivising more sustainable choices, because unless we scale down animal ag we all actually will starve.
It's not cheaper to grow crops, the amount of work that goes into growing crops is a reason we have a shortage of labor to harvest them. It's back breaking work and requires a ton of time. It's also not a for sure thing. One bad season and you can lose entire tons of harvest.
I think you may be underestimating the heavy level of subsidies here
https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
Even despite that, overall in most countries it actually ends up being cheaper to do a healthy plant-based diet assuming you have more whole-foods and less say plant-based meats
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
And real world data backs this up
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via%3Dihub ---(looking at the US)
https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9
First, it is always unclear whether the omitted-variable bias exists because the “true” model is unknown. Thus, future research may include more covariates other than the ones considered here to minimize the bias. Moreover, studies like the present study rely on consumers’ capacity to honestly report information on the food consumed. Future research may consider other methodologies that can actually observe and report all foods consumed and the cost associated with them. This way, it will also be possible to capture other personal, cultural, socio-economic, and behavioural characteristics of the consumers which are difficult to assess using the present methodology. However, data of this nature would be expensive to collect.
why didn't you include the name of the study?
the oxford study doesn't account for people who don't pay money for food, grow their own, hunt, fish, raise livestock, or even have it subsidized. basically, it doesn't account for poor people anywhere in the developed world. you are jumping to conclusions to say that it is cheaper for anyone but the wealthiest people.
I cited more than one study. The other ones looked at average real world spending data
so why include the misleading one?
I disagree with your premise that it is misleading at all. Including things that the majority of the population does not do nor can scale to the overall population would not work for a modeling study. Most people are not hunters, including that in a cost estimation study would just be giving people a false sense of true cost. Real world data would be more reliable way for that if you wanted to try to include that in a more realistic way
most people get at least some of their food for free, subsidized, or through farming, gardening, or hunting. this study only accounted for foods taht people buy. it's misleading to claim this represents accurately how much people spend on food.
i refuted the one i had already seen. i'll deal with the others later.