Food and agriculture have a significant impact on our planet, particularly in terms of carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use.
It makes the exception for land use change for chocolate, but isn’t almost all agricultural land a land use change which contributes? Most soybean and other crops aren’t as effective at sequestering carbon as the natural grasslands they took over. Orchards and other crops also took over forests and turned them into pastures and fields.
This can be misleading. For instance: raising dairy cattle in lush and water rich areas with no or limited dependency on fossil water is very different than dairy cattle being raised in the desert with 90% of the food being trucked in and the cheese also being made in the desert using extremely limited fresh water.
Beef is certainly super high impact, generally but how we go about it super matters.
Does it really make that much difference if 70% of grown plants globally are fed to animals?
70% of grown plants globally are fed to animals
they’re not.
It’s informative, but 1kg of beef and 1kg of coffee beans is not a meaningful comparison :D
If fish and prawn use so much water, we should figure out how to raise them aeroponically.
This infographic brought to you by the oil industry™
Please focus on this infographic and curbing your own satisfaction, so we can continue to be the biggest polluter AND make money hand over fist.
I mean not really.
Live stock accounts for 60% of land usage, but only 2% of calories consumed. Much of that land is growing feed for cattle. They eat millions more calories in grain than is harvested.
Meat is just such a luxury with how many resources it uses. Like the world doesn’t have enough space for everyone to eat meat like the US does.
It also feels very cruel to grow so much feed for cows when people are starving.
But people love Meat and have it part of their culture so people won’t stop no matter what.
So fingers crossed for lab grown meat so this debate can just vanish.
most cows mostly eat grass. what crops are given to livestock is usually plants (or parts of plants) that people can’t or won’t eat.
I think what they’re getting at is that the land being used to grow that grass and inedible plants could instead be used to grow plants that humans can eat.
