by seec | 2025-09-23 16:59:05+00:00
Yes I know about the argument of reducing farmland, supposedly up to 40% of it is used for animal feed.

I'm already very skeptical of such high figures, to me it sounds like the absurdist argument of cow water use, that include all the water used for the lifecycle of the animal and more while conveniently forgetting that we use a ton of water to process plant both at the exploitation stage and consumption stage (good luck consuming cereals and legumes without water). To me it sounds like a reductionist argument that tries to compare things that really aren't comparable.

But even if we accept the premise, it seems based on a fantasy world where every land is equal to another and you can produce any kind of crop anywhere. Animal feeds are generally low-quality crops that farmers put on soil where the good stuff doesn't grow that well. It's also used for cycling, when soil is too depleted to support another growth with decent yields. Even if we would stop all animal farming overnight, the amount of land you could reclaim for plant agriculture would never match what was freed. If you look where they do intensive animal farming, it tends to be in places where plant farming would be very difficult at the very least. One easy example is the milk cows in the mountains.

I go running in semi-wild space near a river and I often find grazing cows in the swamps. A lot of the land near the river is actually used to graze cows or to grow hay that will feed the cows in the winter. You can't really use the land for anything else really, one year the farmer tried putting wheat and he never did it again. I suspect the yield and quality wasn't good enough, so it was mostly a waste of ressources. However, another nearby farmer has been farming corn, which is definitely used as animal feed. The crop is probably more tolerant to the environmental pressure of this land and has good yields (has been that way for over 20 years).

What's more, the thing is that animal farming fundamentally doesn't get you the same stuff as plant farming. The macro nutrient ratio is not the same and even the micro nutrient profile is very different. You can't say I'll substitute beef with some random cereals; they are definitely not the same. So, you need different crops, like legume, that are much more demanding on the soil and don't grow as well everywhere as the common cereals. Potentially you could re-arrange things around and optimise to get the best yield for every type of plant depending on what's needed at the level of a country for example. But this is an optimisation problem and those are already very hard but with many independent actors who will try to maximise their profits it's almost impossible. I guess we could go full on communism but I think you can understand why that would be even more undesirable than animal farming.

On top of that, animals are very often eating waste byproducts of plant farming. One example is cattle cake, derived from soybean oil production. This is just a single example and from what I coud find, it's not an insignificant amount of waste that gets "recycled" like that. It's not clear that we could do anything else with it, so in a way animal farming has a virtuous component where it "upcycles" waste.

I'll ask a question: if plant farming is so much more efficient, how come things like soya steaks are still expensive? They are not cheaper than most animal proteins, at every comparison point (weight, protein ratio, caloric density). It doesn't make any sense. Logically if getting proteins from plants is really more efficient than animals, they should be much cheaper, that's basic economics.

I believe this is because most arguments around plant farming do not factor everything in the equation and that makes plants look better. You can eat a steak with minimum preparation and energy use (technically you can eat it raw if you are sure there is no contamination risk), throw it in a pan for a few minutes and it's done. But plants like soya need a lot of processing, using both a lot of water and energy. Even if you get the raw stuff, it needs to be washed and cooked, and those things take a very long time. I make hummus from raw chickpeas very often and cooking time is at least 45 min. Suddenly you need to add energy cost, water cost at the very least (and time cost, but we can try to ignore it and pretend we are all money poor but time rich). In similar fashion, tofu needs a shit ton of water and lots of energy for cooking (they actually have problem with waste management from tofu production in Asia because the water used is often released directly in rivers and it kills the fishes).

I think that if plant food was that much more efficient, it would already be reflected in the consumer price. You could attribute high prices to greed and low volume but that doesn't make a lot of sense. If it was possible, producers would undercut to get larger parts of the market even if it is small compared to animal products (it is still a big market at the country level so there are definitely profits to be made if that was possible). For commodities like food, I think the price reflects the efficiency of ressource use to get the product to market, it's the concept of embodied energy. If plant-based products don't do better it's probably because they aren't actually any less wasteful than animal farming.

After you have considered those things, it is necessary to consider the impact on health/feeling. There are plenty of people who have tried veganism and couldn't stick to it for health-related reasons. Even if you are not technically sick, feeling good is not something most people would like to give up. Surviving is one thing but you'll have a hard time convincing people to give up animal foods if they end up feeling like an inmate in a concentration camp.

This is my experience. I have a very chaotic diet for many reasons and sometimes I "forget" to eat animal food. I become an unplanned vegetarian/vegan from time to time for a few days. When I start to feel weird and think about eating some meat, the feeling on the subsequent day is really incomparable. I suspect this is the same experience that many ex-vegans tell, and it is hard to handwave away. What's the point of protecting the environment, if your life ends up being miserable when doing so? It's a very hard sell and I think that short of a complete ban on animal products, people will never give them up.

Even if all of this was completely wrong, it seems preposterous to focus on diet as a way to reduce environnemental damage. Eating is a fundamental experience of life and it isn't just the thing that gets you to survive, it's a pleasurable thing and a social activity as well. Coming up with moral arguments to justify how people should eat is akin to religious behavior and unsurprisingly all religions have all kinds of diet requirements. It doesn't seem reasonable to completely rework diet solely to reduce environmental damage (it's not even clear how much reduction would be really possible in the first place). This is particularly true when there are many other things that we could do to reduce environnemental damage and wouldn't touch one of the fundamentals of human life. For example, the overuse of the single ownership car design lifestyle, abuse of international travel purely for leisure and in fact plenty of things we do solely for leisure or in social status. Or things like purchasing all kinds of crap we don't need and really most of the stuff of the capitalist economy where people buy stuff to use it a few times at best when it could be shared by many. Before requiring people to change their diet we could heavily tax consumer products coming from countries with very lax environmental laws and from companies that make things that don't last, fast fashion, etc...

All the arguments around vegetarianism/veganism always seems like virtue signaling and a cheap attempt at getting moral high ground. If one has to make an effort to reduce environmental harm, there are plenty of low hanging fruits of lifestyle change before having to touch at the diet.

For this reason, even if all the propaganda around the plant-based farming/diet turns out to be completely true, I don't think it matters all that much. That being said, I am still very much interested in the correct answer, I just want to know for sure, so I'll keep reading on the subject. Personally I already have a low impact lifestyle so I don't feel like giving up animal food on top of that, especially since it makes me feel like shit...