We should all stop eating meat in the long-term

I can't dispute your argument. Even Albert Einstein agreed with it.

But why wait for the long term? Why wait for the government to tell you what you can and can't eat? Why not reduce your meat consumption today? If everyone in America had three meatless days a month, it would be as if 10% of the population became vegetarian.

Edit: I just thought of one. People could eat bugs, which are healthy and less damaging to the environment. They are technically meat. Also, I'm not sure where you stand on lab grown meat, but that's also an option. (Personally, I would consider them to be vegan because you wouldn't hurt any animals to make it. As such I don't think it would count.)

Why stop there? Many of the same premises you list could similarly support the opinion, "we should all stop drinking alcohol in the long term". Drinking alcohol is unhealthy and an obvious waste of farmland.

I think you would agree that once we start implementing these ideas, such efforts would be almost unenforceable at best. If pork production is outlawed, would it be similarly illegal to keep a pet pig? What if my pet pig dies in an 'accident', am I allowed to eat it? I'm starting to imagine going into the hills of the Appalachians and finding my underground bacon dealer...

Now, you might be arguing that, well, the government shouldn't actually do anything about it, but that we should want to be vegetarians. That's not really possible to argue against - I suppose if a magic fairy came by and magically made me not want to consume meat that would have a beneficial effect. But we're omnivores - our desire to eat meat is pretty ingrained. I love food, cooking and eating are my primary hobbies, and eliminating meat consumption entirely would negatively impact my happiness.

If you think that we should eat less meat, I agree.

More effictive use of the worlds farmland is kind of irrelevant: we already produce more than enough food to feed everybody on the planet, world hunger is an artifact of inequitable distribution of wealth. Its that we don't have a good way to distribute food to many people, not that there isn't enough food.

So there are other options on the table other than a blanket ban on meat. One of the best options is reduce reliance on cattle as a source of food. I'm not saying get rid of them all together but reduce consumption by say 40%. Then look to other sources. Fish farming (in certain species such as tilapia) can be used to create fertilizer and clean hydroponics farms. Cows can be used to stop and slow desertification and their gas production can be drastically reduced by adding seaweed to their diets (which would require efforts in both restoring natural seaweed beds and farming new ones so yay more jobs and a more abundant food source in seaweed). Deer which are becoming overly abundant can be hunted more to help reduce reliance on traditional cattle farming. Basically there are far more productive and environmentally friendly options than just dropping ranching all together, but it involves careful planning and concerted efforts. We can both condense meat production, and reduce environmental impact by changing eating habits and farming patterns without just giving it up whole hog.

As for the animal suffering thing. Meh. If we change to different farming methods with less focus on amount of production and instead on quality then it will be better in the long run for both us and the cattle. On top of that I don't find the reduce suffering all that convincing anyways. Life will always have suffering and we will always face it no matter how good we have it, and we will find happiness no matter how bad we have it, we can change methods to make it more natural and humane, but when it comes down to it as long as there is life there will be suffering so it makes a pretty shitty ethical measuring stick.

By the way the "large initial cull" we have a word for that. Genocide. Basically if we get rid of the usefulness of cows in human use we are going to cause them to go extinct. Most farm animals could not survive in the wild without human care. We have formed a symbiotic relationship with them, and its kinda a dick move to say "Hey you get to go extinct because of my ethical obligation to the abstract concept of reducing suffering in the long term (which you certainly don't understand in the same way that I do). Your death and extinction is for the greater good (which is a relative position anyways)."

So, my sister is majoring in sustainable agriculture. I've done research on homesteading. We are both avid gardeners, shop at local farmers' markets, and are friends with farmers and homesteaders. I'm also a big lefty hippie, almost crunchy--I just happen to be a science-loving skeptic. This is just for context, here.

Less meat should be the goal, but not no meat. First of all, there are people who just are omnivores, and cannot be otherwise--digesting vegetable material is less efficient (see: cows and their four stomachs, rabbits that have to eat a lot of their poop to fully absorb the nutrients, and so on), and not everyone can be healthy on a plant-based diet and supplements. Ask any doctor or nutritionist, and they'll tell you that while supplements are great, they are still often just making expensive pee. The most famous example was a vegan blogger who had to stop being vegan because it was literally killing her--she spent years trying to be vegan, under medical supervision, but her body just would not absorb enough nutrients. Obviously this is not most people, but it is at least some people.

(On that note, pretty much every herbivore will also happily eat meat if given the chance. Vegetarian-fed chickens are not eating a proper chicken diet--chickens allowed to forage will not only eat bugs, but also mice, lizards, other small birds, their own eggs sometimes, and so on. Pigs love meat, and will kill and eat other animals in addition to foraging for plant material. Heck, even animals like squirrels or ruminants like cows will eat meat if the opportunity arises--like the video of the cow gobbling up a live baby chicken that got too close. It isn't their main source of food, because they are adapted to digest plants as well as meat, but they will definitely eat it, because it's such a good source of food.)

You also can't have any animals products without killing animals. You point out eggs as a good source of protein, and a good vegetarian option--but chickens only lay regularly for the first couple of years of life, and then become far less productive. You also, when breeding the next generation of laying hens, end up with a lot of excess male chicks. So, to have an egg industry, you either need to a) still kill a lot of chickens, so why waste it?, or b) let the world be overrun by chickens and we will all be pecked to death. I'm not kidding. Chickens can live for 10-12 years, despite only being particularly fertile for 2.

You also can raise animals on land that isn't suitable for farming. Remember how the Dust Bowl happened (if you are American and studied history at all, anyways)? It's because farmers ripped up grasslands and tried to farm on them. Those open grasslands couldn't sustain plant agriculture, but did support billions of grazing herd animals (before we killed them all as part of our efforts towards Native American genocide). Cows or bison or other ruminants could happily graze there, and not be letting land go to waste.

Goats are another example. Goats eat anything, and can live happily in arid areas where plant agriculture is not particularly sustainable. They are also way more ecologically sustainable than cows--they produce more milk for less ecological impact,

Now lets move on to pigs! Do you know how pigs generally used to be raised? You'd set them free in your forests, and let them forage, and then go round them up when it was time to cull them. Heritage pig breeds were far more self-sustaining, but when culture shifted to commercial farming and having to eat piles of meat at every meal, we switched mostly over to breeding pigs that could be kept in terrible conditions, instead of the pigs that lived happily in forests. Go to a fancy meat shop, and the most expensive cured meat you'll find is Iberico ham, raised on acorns. That shit is delicious (but acorns, while edible for humans, are super gross). We still need forests, so there would be no reason not to be raising pigs in them.

Deer were kept in the same manner (which is why it would be illegal to poach in a king's forest, because those deer were for his table). And deer are also just wild animals in giant herds with no real predators left. They will overbreed, and starve, and get hit by cars, and invade human spaces and eat crops, and so on, if they are not hunted and culled. So if nothing else, we sure as hell need to be eating venison.

Another aspect of sustainable plant agriculture is letting fields lie fallow, with cover crops on them (like clover, or certain legumes) that are then tilled back into the soil to restore nutrients. You can just let those fields be fallow, or you can let a bunch of chickens forage for bugs in them, or let your goats munch the weeds, and so on. This idea that all land can be used EITHER for plants OR for animals is very false.

Also on the sustainable plant agriculture level, let's not forget fertilizer. Animal manure is a rich source of nutrients, and if you are trying to keep soil healthy and rich with natural fertilizers and a rich ecosystem of helpful bacteria, instead of dumping water-soluble chemical fertilizers that run off into the local water supplies and cause algae blooms in the oceans, well... you kind of need some animal poop. Rabbits are great for homesteaders and small farms, because they're the only animal where you don't even have to worry about composting it first!

There are also plenty of domesticated animals that would absolutely die if humans were not keeping them. Quail, for example. We have bred the brooding straight out of quail--if you want to actually hatch quail eggs, you need an incubator or to keep a couple of Bantam hens (or a similar friendly broody breed) to sit on them, because domestic quail just leave their eggs laying around and won't sit on them. If humans all died, it wouldn't just be the bulldogs all dying out.

That's before we even get into aquaponics. You can make amazing green systems that are self-sustaining, producing both edible plants and edible seafood. It's generally stuff like tilapia, but as someone who doesn't like fishes, I've been doing more research into aquaponics with shrimp, which is also a very viable, sustainable, and successful growing field. It's just a better way to sustain an ecosystem than by dumping chemicals. I know that sounds like a hippie thing to say, but seriously, read this article from over a DECADE ago about the havoc that modern industrial chemical agriculture has had on the oceans. It's horrifying.

Now, I absolutely and vehemently support eliminating animal cruelty in agriculture, or at least coming as close as humanly possible. Which does mean eating a lot less meat--both because it will be much more expensive, and because you cannot sustainably produce the amount of meat that the Standard American Diet calls for. But again, that's a good thing for our health as well. Optimal health is easiest produced with some animal products, but we definitely have been eating too much.

I'm a homesteader (small farmer) in rural Pennsylvania. I raise chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and usually one accessory animal (rabbits, goats, geese, etc. in rotation). Raising animals for food, even beef cattle, can not only be done in ways that aren't harmful to the environment, but can and should be done in ways that are a net-positive for the environment. North America used to be grassland and temperate forests, browsed by migrating megafauna, such as bison. Large, herbivorous animals keep forests and grasslands healthy. Obviously, the way we raise these animals today is not healthy for the landscape (CAFOs, poultry houses, etc) but that is not the only way to raise meat.

People will argue that a) raising all of our meat the way I do would make meat too expensive for a lot of people or b) you just can't feed the world on ethically and sustainably-raised meat.

To point a, I would argue that a healthy food culture should value food higher than what we currently do. We spend very little per capita on food compared to other developed countries and, in my opinion, the quality of food available through the most common venues (super markets, chain restaurants) reflects that.

To point b, I'd argue that it's not my responsibility to feed "the world." I feed my family, my customers at the farmer's market, and a small circle of customers who buy products "off market." I have a very small plot of land (15 acres) and only use about a third of that for raising meat animals.

I would argue, specifically, that if I stopped raising animals for meat, a couple things that falsify your premise would happen.

So it would probably be better for the environment, suffering of the animals and our general health

The land on which I live would suffer. My animals contribute to the fertility of the soil, the health of my forest, the health of my creek, and keep insects in balance. I use the composted manure of my poultry to build fertility in my gardens and orchard. My pigs are pastured in the forest and break down rotting logs, clear invasive understory species of flora, and manure the forest floor. My ducks eat insect larvae from the creek and maintain the creek banks with their browsing habits. The chickens and turkeys devour untold numbers of ticks, flies, and other insects.

Without my livestock animals, my property would become scrubby and weedy. Ticks, rodents, and mosquitos would flourish, and I would have to turn to artificial fertilizers to grow my vegetables. If I wanted to produce the same amount of protein as what I produce with my animals, I would have to clear-cut my forest to plant soy and other beans.

I would assert that my animals do not suffer. Every animal I raise is free-range and pastured... and not in the grocery store marketing kind of way. Literally, my pigs' pasture consists of a couple of acres of hardwood forest that they have full access to at all times. My poultry are left out of their houses at dawn and could literally set off in one direction and I would never see them again. However, each day at dusk, they are right back at their roosts, where I close them in to keep predators from eating them. Their eventual deaths are instantaneous and humane. If they were set free, their deaths would be slow and gruesome. But honestly, none of these animals would even exist if it weren't for me raising them for food. My meat chickens are 2/3 hatched from my own laying flock. If I were to stop eating chicken, I would stop hatching eggs.

I was a vegetarian for 5 years prior to starting this farm (and vegan for one of those years). My reasons were that I didn't want to support factory farming and I wasn't willing to pay the dollar amount necessary for animals raised to my standards. Now that I do it myself, my costs are very low and I can control for quality for the entire process. I am much healthier today than I was when I was a grocery store vegetarian. A lot of that comes from the manual labor necessary to farm in the way I do. Yes, you can go to a gym... but I believe there is a qualitative difference in "simulated labor" (lifting weights) and functional labor. I lift weights through the down-season to maintain my body, but I am my strongest and leanest when I'm laboring to house and protect my animals. I can't give objective facts in this area, but I did want to address it.

As someone who can't eat vegetables, salad or fruit, I'd be mildly fucked in this brave new meatless world. Also, I feel like if we all stopped having children that would be better for the environment, but no one will do that either for similar reasons (personal choice, happiness, etc)

Not all meat production can be replaced by meaningful crops. Many farms in mountainous regions that raise livestock such as goats and sheep take the sheep/goats out for grazing for a large portion of the year (and in some places they can graze out during the winter as well), and eventually the sheep are butchered for consumption. The trouble with this landscape is not only the hilly terrain (which arguably could be turned into terrace farms) but also the often shallow and poor soil which will not grow many plants very well. Thus, essentially that soil/landscape is best used for grazing sheep and goats, and not suitable for much else as far as food production goes. Therefore I would argue that there exists meat production which, if banned, would increase demand for agricultural area and in essence make us chop down more of the amazon and such and be bad for the environment.

Sheep that are fed during the winter with food grown in good soil could come out negatively in this equation, though, compared to using that good soil for human food. However, if you cut off that food supply to the sheep you are effectively in some cases cutting off using the mountainous landscape for food production unless some other methods arise. Therefore, you sort of "invest" the good crops to enable the use of the bad soil for something, possibly increasing the total food production of our planet. Some diminishing returns when seeking to maximize our food production is to be expected, though.

This is beside the ethics and health discussion, though.

I think we should mostly stop eating meat, because of the environmental damage caused by large-scale farming, but there is one exception: hunting.

Hunting native, wild game is basically feeding ourselves off the sustainable production of a healthy ecosystem. There is no more environmentally responsible source of protein than shooting a deer in the forest behind the house or eating fish from a local lake, both within the bounds of scientifically-determined regulations. The meat is lean, organic, free-range, and local. Getting the same amount of protein from tofu requires a certain amount of space in an erosive, monoculture soybean field somewhere that could have been a diverse forest or prairie. Even an organic garden entails a small reduction in habitat for native species. There's also a carbon cost to harvesting, processing, and transporting to market industrially farmed products like tofu. In the grand scheme of things they're very good compared to farmed meat, but the environmental cost of responsibly hunted local meat is practically zero.

Of course, hunting cannot sustainably support more than a small portion of the world's population. So it should remain a very small part of humanity's food source portfolio. But removing it from the portfolio altogether would be worse for the environment than keeping it in.

Also, contrary to popular belief, hunting probably does not contribute to net animal suffering in the world. Of course, any animal that gets shot is not having a good day. But one has to compare hunting against the alternatives that would take its place if we stopped hunting. In large tracts of healthy wildlands, natural predators might increase in abundance to keep up with the increased prey supply. The prey animals will still be getting killed, but in a scarier, slower, more painful way, by predators with a preference for the youngest animals, in contrast to hunters' preference for older trophy animals. If habitat changes preclude wild predators from stepping in to control a population, it overpopulates, increasing the transmission of deadly diseases and/or overgrazing essential habitats (especially winter food supply). Both lead to slow, miserable deaths, and overgrazing can have ripple effects on countless other species that share the same resources. Therefore, cessation of human hunting would probably not reduce, and might even increase, animal suffering overall. It would not lead to animals living longer or happier lives or having less painful deaths.

Although hunting is generally good as a widespread practice, there are some cases on which it's even more essential:

• Many people here in Alaska, especially Eskimos and Athabascans, live in villages hundreds of miles from the nearest road, where all supplies from broader civilization have to be flown in at substantial financial and fossil fuel expense. Ever heard about the $15 gallons of milk? These people are surrounded by a wilderness that produces great numbers of moose, caribou, wild sheep, black bear, game birds, and other wild foods. There is no good farmland. Eating meat is the most environmentally sensible choice for these people and it helps them stay in touch with their cultural traditions.

• Another clear example is New Zealand, which is overrun with many invasive species of deer and other game animals that wreak havoc on the native flora and compete with the native fauna. They have no natural predators on the island, and introducing predators would drive already-endangered native species extinct. It's an environmental disaster if humans don't hunt them.

Therefore, your contention that we should all stop eating meat is unsupportable. Humanity should greatly reduce its meat intake, but not eliminate it altogether.

Before I get to my main point, I do mostly agree - but I wanted to point out one error - the Amazon, and other rain forests are primarily being destroyed not just for grazing - but more so to produce silage, hay, grain, and other "food" for the livestock themselves. Grazing is only a small reason why forests are destroyed, they are mostly destroyed so crops can be grown and the crops themselves are fed to the livestock. Also in terms of cruelty chicken and eggs production are probably the most cruel of all food industries - I stopped eating chicken years ago - we don't even have humane slaughter laws for chickens - look how bad battery hens are kept and then ask what happened to all the hen's brothers...

Okay - now my point.

I agree we should all greatly reduce the amount of meat we consume - most people in North America consume 3-4 times more meat than they "need" and it's a huge waste - the amount of meat one person eats at one meal here is typically enough to feed a family of 4 in Japan. As such our problem is multiplied because we are meat gluttons - noting the proper portion size is 4 oz (the size of a deck of cards) and we don't need meat daily.

In many poor countries people might get meat only a couple times a month. They eat a lot of beans and rice otherwise.

OKAY - Why should we still eat some meat?

Hunted meat is far more humane and more environmentally friendly - in some areas hunting is important because there are far too many deer for an area to support over the winter - so without hunting many would starve to death.

So.. if in combination of eating less meat, consuming it only a couple of times a month, and opting for hunting rather than farming, we can still eat meat but must eat A LOT LESS than we currently do!

Noting that some children in particular have suffered health problems from being put on a strict vegetarian or vegan diet, so meat is an important part while growing up, but we certainly don't have to eat nearly as much as we do.

Some people with anemia or other health problems really have a difficult time on a vegetarian diet, so do require some red meat in their diet.

So.. to summarize - we should still eat meat, but eat far LESS of it than we do and opt for hunting rather than "farming".

I'm a vegan and I will attempt to argue against my view here. I agree with you but I will try anyways because I think it's important that I challenge my views.

If humans as a whole where to completely go off meet there would be an issue growing certain plants and vegetables. We can already see how harmful the effects the need for palm oil is on its local habitats. Forests need to be destroyed to make room for farm land. If every went vegan the demand for things such as palm oil and other tropical vegetation would increase greatly. We would basically have to destroy all the rain forest to keep up with demands. Who knows what other habitats will be destroyed to make way for those niche products we use. Animals and native vegetation will become extinct.

Obviously the counter argument is that we find ways to not use palm oil and such but that wasn't what you asked or where proposing.

You seem to think we should eat more eggs, instead of meat. This seems to counter your argument about considering the lives of the animals we're eating, because to service that many people, those chickens would likely live in equally poor conditions. Also, are you including fish on the "ok" list? Because those have already been extremely overfished.

However, most of the animals that are used as livestock shouldn't feel much pain (ex: the changes to slaughterhouses that were established by Temple Grandin vastly improved quality of life for cows).

My main argument, however, would be for people with dietary issues. As a girl, it's not uncommon for me to get low iron. I take medical steps to prevent it (I have an IUD for this reason), but iron pills can have negative effects for a lot of people, such as causing stomach pain, constipation, diarrhea, or vomiting. A lot of the foods that are high in iron besides meat are seafood (overfishing), beans (common trigger food for people with digestive issues, such as IBS, or Crohn's), dark leafy greens (also a trigger food, and the iron is harder for your body to digest). On a personal level, I would be PISSED if the government tried to interfere with my diet, because there are so few foods I can eat without getting sick, and I eat a very small amount of red meat.

Instead, you should find the motivation on your own to make those changes. Limit the number of meals that incorporate meat and learn to cook with substitutes. It is much more feasible idea for many people to make small changes to their habits than to issue a government ban.

So it would probably be better for the environment, suffering of the animals and our general health

Which is a fine argument, but it doesn't change the fact that I derive enjoyment from: hunting, killing, butchering, preparing, and eating meat. This experience is not duplicatable without animals and their meat.

Meat is super bad for the environment, but some meats more than others. Beef is the worst, pork much less and chicken (raised in compact and nasty conditions for its short 6 week life) isn't that bad. Equally some animals can be reared in better conditions than others. Therefore I think it is probably too general to say people should stop eating all meat unless you believe killing animals under any circumstances is wrong.

Hunting animals to control populations is perfectly natural and in some cases important for the ecosystem. Also meat from insects is very low environment impact and generally isn't as big an animal rights concern.

I just have a hypothetical thought experiment for you:

Let's suppose (and this is probably a considerable underestimate in reality) that growing sufficient crops to feed a person for 1 year kills 10,000 insects, 20 mice, 12 moles, 2 rabbits, and a cute little hedgehog (just in the thought experiment).

Let's further imagine (quite accurately) that the deaths of these creatures were horrible torture: lingeringly poisoned by nerve toxins, cut in half by machinery, exposed by harvesting to predatory birds tearing them limb from limb, the whole 9 yards.

Finally, let's imagine that a cow was raised without killing any of those sentient suffering beings, or at least very few, accidentally and quickly, by the cow stepping on them. It is raised 100% grass fed. Furthermore, it is allowed to roam a pasture at will, and is killed nearly instantly after having been humanely stunned first. Let's also say (again, pretty accurately) that this 1 cow could supply the needed calories to feed that same person for 1 year.

Among these 2 choices, which approach is more ethical, and why?

Note: I'm not saying that any of these numbers are exactly accurate, or that most of cow meat you can find in the store has these characteristics. This is just a thought experiment.

I'm curious to hear your rationale.

I'm a human. It's natural behavior for my species to kill and eat animals and clothe myself in their skins. We're living on a planet where bodies survive by consuming other bodies.

Your argument is as follows: we're forcing other animals to live in unnatural conditions, and to prevent this, we should force ourselves to live in (even more) unnatural conditions.

But why? Animal suffering you say. We're living in a symbiosis with our livestock. We provide them food, shelter from the elements and from predators, we enable them to procreate in a save way. With our help, cows have become the most successful mammal on the planet if you look at the numbers. That's the basis of a symbiotic partnership in evolution. Both species benefit. It might not seen much to you, the judging human, but from nature's perspective that's all that counts: survival and procreation.

If you want to see animals suffering, go look at wildlife, where many predators don't take the time to kill their prey but eat them alive, where every life ends in fear and despair instead of a quick bolt shot, where prey has to live in constant fear of death, so far that they panic due to the slightest movement.

Can we say for sure that the animals we keep as livestock are less "happy" than the animals that live in the wild? Isn't that all just projection and anthropomorphism?

If you think about it, we're doing to them exactly what we do to ourselves; forcing them to live in a crowded environments they've not evolved for, to behave in 'unnatural' ways and be exploited for the benefit of the whole. We're a self-domesticating species. Hey, let's fix that, maybe? Until then, please let me hang some pieces of other species over the fire and eat them, the last sad remembrance of the hunter-gatherer-life I'm supposed to live according to my genetic makeup.

EDIT: a word

Meat is a fast easy way to get protein. Yes, if you overdo it you can get sick, but that goes with plenty of things.

In 3rd world countries chickens are cheap and easy to raise. If you tell them they can no longer eat meat they would starve.

Vegetarianism is okay for some, but it requires work to get the protein needed to be healthy.

Humans eat meat. That's just the way it is. If you have to go out of your way to be healthy not eating meat, that should tell you something.

Livestock, especially cows, take up so much of the worlds farmland that could be better utilized growing crops

In the US at least, this is a non-issue. We have inordinate amounts of extra land that we aren't even using for anything, that could be used as farmland. So it's not like we're out of room and have to choose between the two.

Animal suffering is another thing

This is true and can be dealt with a variety of ways. Firstly, free-range / non factory farmed animals can mitigate the moral issues as well as things like excessive antibiotic use. Secondly, we aren't too far away from lab grown meats, which will have no moral implications.

Also red meat specifically has been linked to increased risk of some cancers

I don't see how this point fits in your argument, unless you are proposing that we ban everything that has a chance at causing cancer (and lots of stuff has the potential to cause cancer). Moreover, moderate to low amounts of meats appear to not have any negative benefits; many of the so called 'Blue Zone' societies eat meat occasionally.

Humans are omnivores. That is why we have canines and incisors - for meat. If we have not yet evolved to eliminate those teeth, natural selection has not decided it is time to stop eating meat. Perhaps we will perhaps we won't, but not in our lifetimes.

Okay so I am not going to attempt defend rampant meat consumption, but am trying to address the idea that no meat is the optimal amount.

Argument 1:

When humans farm we produce a lot of food, we also produce a lot of plant matter that isn't food, and a lot of food that isn't edible.

Cows goats and other animals are able to convert this inedible junk into food and fertilizer.

You may have heard that you only get 10% of the calories a cow eats or some crap like that. Well if you are feeding the cow crap humans wouldn't eat anyway that is a free 10%. So yeah, livestock isn't always wasteful.

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Argument 2:

While there are meat replacements, we have to actually look at how available these meat replacements are. Sure here in California we can dump a metric ton of water into a field to produce a bag of almonds and a head(?) of broccoli, but not everyone can do that. Vegetables are extremely difficult to grow, can not be produced in most of the world, and do not scale well.

I mean soybeans (from soymilk and tofu fame) are fucking bean trees. You can't exactly just grow bean trees on 40% of the United States.

California already grows 80-90% of the vegetables in the United States, and it isn't clear how much more demand it can handle.

Good luck growing iron rich vegetables in the African planes... So is it possible that healthy vegetarianism is a first world privilege?

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Argument 3:

People will always tell you that farming is a more efficient use of land than ranching. While this is true, it is only because the limits to farming aren't land. Ranching turns large swathes of land into food. Farming turns shit tons of water, fertilizer, and insecticides into food.

If all the land used for ranching was turned into farmland we would solve world hunger. But only because you would die of dehydration first.

Sure ranching is an inefficient use of land, but we need to use all our resources efficiently, and turning land into food is pretty damn useful.

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Argument 4:

Are insects meat? If you are considering insects to be meat they are an extremely way to turn inedible calories such as those lock up in cellulose into edible calories.

They are also often nutrient rich, land efficient, water efficient, they don't produce bad gasses, and have almost no calorie waste. They also don't feel true pain or suffering.

If we are talking about ideal food sources, they should be at the top of the list.

As for the meat industry's negative effect on the environment, I agree. It's bad. But there are two kinds of meat farming. There's factory farming, and there's free range.

• Factory farming requires very little space per unit of meat, but requires that food is grown somewhere else.

• Free range requires a lot of space per unit of meat, but doesn't require much food to be grown somewhere else.

This means both use a lot of space, but the former is terrible for the animals, while the latter is great for the animals. However, the former has the option of severely reducing the necessary amount of space, by feeding the animals artificially produced food. This is not an option for free range food. Factory farms can also be moved underground, and/or stacked in highrise-like buildings. The same goes for artificially produced animal feed. This runs into the same caveats as electric vehicles (the vehicle might be environmentally friendly, but the electricity isn't necessarily), but is otherwise the best option for the environment as far as goes deforestation and whatnot, but again, it's terrible for the animals.

With that said, however, all of this can be circumvented in its entirety, by artificially producing meat. It's certainly possible, and in a few years it might even be a viable option (as far as go costs and whatnot). This will leave only the nutritional value of meat.

So let's boil it down. If I understand you correctly, you want people to eat less/no meat because 1) it's bad for the environment and 2) it's unhealthy, in that order. Animal welfare is a common theme among vegetarians, but I don't think you touched on that, so I'll leave it be for now.

Your first issue can be solved rather easily, by either 1) making factory farming more prevalent than it already is, moving it all underground and/or into highrise-like structures, and feeding the animals entirely artificially produced feed, or 2) producing meat artificially.

Your second issue can only be solved by not eating meat.

My point is that there's only really one reason to oppose meat itself, and that is that it might be unhealthy. All other reasons I can think of (including animal welfare, I just didn't elaborate on that here because you didn't touch on it) can be solved without removing meat from the menu altogether.

Having a more sustainable and humane farming practices should defiantly be a goal, but we don't need to stop eating meat to get there. In many farms, the animals that live there have far better lives than their wild counterparts. In the wild they are constantly running from predators, their children are eaten often, and most of their lives end by them being eaten alive. But in our care, they don't have to worry about predators because we protect them and their offspring. They live a relatively stress free life. And when it's time to kill them it's quick and painless. It should be noted there is a large spectrum of how we treat animals and I'm talking the higher end, but there is no reason all farms can't be this way. An extreme example would be Kobe Cows, if we treated all farm animals like that than I don't think it would be immoral to eat farm animals. Although personally, I know the majority of livestock raising is pretty deplorable.

Also, growing crops is not without harm. Most new farmland comes from cutting tropical rain forest. In brazil this farmland is used primarily for soy beans. This causes huge reductions in natural habitats, the endangerment of many species, and a large carbon footprint. Furthermore, most farms are monocrop, meaning there isn't much room for biodiversity. One of the few organism that can thrive on monocrop, insects, are killed using pesticides which has many adverse side effects, such as killing the bees.

As far as health, it's far far easier to be healthy with meat in your diet than it is without. That does not mean you can't be vegetarian and healthy, just that it requires more knowledge about what nutrients you need and how to get them. I would argue that educating most people on how to obtain a balance diet without meat is going to be very hard.

So ya eating vegetables isn't as cruelty free as most people think.

First, it's worth noting that converting to veganism won't eliminate animals suffering in order for us to be able to eat. I've had this out with a couple of people in similar threads.

Millions and millions of animals die in the production of vegetables, from pesticides, herbicides, from direct poisoning and trapping, and from mechanical destruction. I think if you consider "insects" to be "animals", then it's clear that more die. Folks have posted a couple of studies, but they all are based on SWAG estimates and exclude all insects, including beneficial insects like bees.

The argument that we should stop growing corn to feed cows isn't unreasonable, and the practice is clearly unsustainable. Grass fed beef doesn't contribute to AGW in the same way (grains are grown from fertilizers refined from fossil fuels, which we then feed to the cows, and they fart out; grass fed cows eat grass, but every bit of carbon they release is re-absorbed into the next year's grass - that is, they can't keep adding carbon to the atmosphere year after year after year). And rice paddies contribute similar amounts of methane to the atmosphere as cow production does.

But the fact is that all of our food is artificially cheap due to government subsidies and deferred cleanup costs. We've got to move to more sustainable farming, and that doesn't mean "just stop eating meat"; our current vegetable farming practices are also unsustainable. We have identified bio-intensive farming methods for many combinations of crops and animals that allow much higher sustainability - such as improving the soil rather than depleting it and propping it up with fossil fuels - but they require a lot of hands-on human time.

And all of our farming methods cause significant animal suffering and death. Arguably, a poisoned rat suffers a fuckton more than a cow that takes a bolt to the brain. How do you quantify the suffering due to the destruction of bees?

I'm not saying that you're entirely wrong; I'm saying that the argument is very simplistic. People love "simple answers" - "stop eating meat" - but nuance is hard.

I have 2 views that I would like you to consider.

Firstly, if you are so concerned about the utilization of the worlds' farmland, animal suffering and the nutritional content of food, why don't you adopt the more extreme view that humans should just consume tablets and capsules that contain our daily nutritional needs? This allows us to: 1. Reduce the need to grow crops as we just need to extract their nutritional content into tablets,where the nutrients are densely compacted. (Allows more room for nature and reduce suffering of both fauna and flora.) 2. The tablets can have a overall longer shelf life, reducing wastage of "food" due it becoming rotten or spoilt. (Helps the environment.) 3. By consuming tablets, it would be easier to control our nutritional and energy intake. (Improves health) 4. And much more...

Secondly, if you are thinking about banning human meat in the long term, why not think further ahead? As we eat less and less meat, our teeth might evolve back to those of a herbivore made up of mainly molars to grind and crush fibre. Now what happens if in that distant future, something happens to cause most plants to die out or become inendible? Like for example a disease wiping out most plants. As a then herbivore, we either have to choose to eat meat or die out. Basically what I am trying to say is that being both an omnivore, we are able to survive better as we can adapt our diet to whatever is available, while completely not eating meat is limiting ourselves from benefits such as: 1. Meat are generally richer in protein and other nutrients. 2. Meat can be found in the ocean, whereas non-meat sources are really uncommon. As a result, we have access to more food. 3. Meat is also a byproduct of animals that we kill in order to obtain something from them such as leather and fur. 4. Salted meat can last longer than vegetables and soy products in several conditions.

Overall, I think that a total ban on consumption of meat has too much drawbacks, and a large simple reason why people would not want to ban meat is because we simply like to eat meat.

I am going to argue against your point from the position of conservation of the environment. I agree wholeheartedly that the current circumstances of the factory farming system are sad and damaging to the ecosystem. However, I think that hunting & fishing are important social and economic drivers of maintaining healthy wild spaces in the United States and other countries, and as such a ban would greatly negatively impact the health of our ecosystem.

First many argue that most of the funding for our well maintained wild spaces comes from both hunters and fishers. What is interesting here is that these are entirely optional taxes that are paid by the hunters, regardless of whether they actually get and animal or not, and which in turn benefit other individuals who wish to enjoy nature.

Additionally, this does not only apply to the united states, as it appears that hunting in Africa is helping with conservation efforts.

Although I agree that killing animals for mass food production, as it currently is performed, is harmful, I would say that curtailing hunting would remove a large portion of the economic and social benefit that many people derive from a variety animal species. Removing that benefit would make it much less likely for humans to be motivated to help ensure that these animal populations were protected by the threats which arise as a part of human expansion.

Finally, removing an activity which provides an avenue for many individuals to interface with, enjoy, and ultimately protect their natural surroundings would increase the risk of habitat destruction for these animals and decrease support for animal conservation in the general populace.

I agree that our current system of livestock raising is an environmental catastrophe and I also agree that overall meat consumption needs to be significantly reduced in the US and most of the developed world for the sake of the environment, animal welfare, and public health. The idea that we need to eat meat at every meal is indefensible from an ethical perspective unless you have certain health conditions or are sourcing exclusively from sustainable producers. Most people should be eating meat more like 3 times a week.

However, I disagree that ALL meat consumption needs to end. Animals play an important and multifunctional role in traditional, sustainable polyculture agriculture. One of the famous examples is rice paddies that use fish and ducks to eat insect pests and weeds and fertilize the rice with their droppings. You could eat only the rice, or you could eat the fish and ducks as well and get three different types of food in the space of one.

Similarly, regions such as the US Great Plains are better suited for grazing animals than plowing, so for people who live in grassland ecosystems, eating grass-fed meat is actually a more sustainable option, as long as the grazing is managed correctly and the land isn't over-grazed.

Livestock can also be used to make the agricultural system more efficient by converting food waste and other agricultural byproducts into eggs and meat. I kept chickens for awhile and hope to do so again in the future - my girls got a significant percentage of their diet directly from our compost pile, turning vegetable peelings and other food waste into delicious eggs for the family. In the process, they turned and aerated the compost, speeding up the decomposition process and their used bedding went straight to my garden to be used as sheet mulch for future or fallow beds.

Rotational grazing is the ideal case for the environment and meat doesn't cause cancer.

So your only remaining argument is animal suffering which I agree with, but that's pretty much solved by going to rotional grazing instead of factory farming IMO.

I live in Wisconsin. Humans fill an important part of the food chain by preying on deer. Without sufficient hunting, deer here destructively overgraze, and reduce the available resources to the point that other deer die slower deaths of starvation. While I agree with you that factory farming is often horrible, strict vegetarianism will not improve all ecosystems.

Even when growing crops, we are going to require large farmland if we are looking to feed the whole world's population. A very very high amount of small animals die when we prepare these lands for crop production. So animal suffering happens regardless.

While I agree that a vegetarian diet is better for the environment. Many of those environmental impacts can also be cut by avoiding factory farms, or hunting the meat by yourself.

The thing that's annoying about when vegetarians say that meat causes cancer is that it's another one of those spurious correlations that are difficult to decipher. Our sample size of people who eat meat is so large that you could link eating meat to just about anything. Many people who have poor vision also eat meat. Many people with Alzheimer's, or Autism, or schizophrenia, or epilepsy also eat meat. That doesn't necessarily mean that a omnivorous diet gives you those things.

Lets look for a moment at the less positive probable outcomes of a ban on humans killing for meat.

• Immediate political unrest from groups whose cultural identity is linked to these food items.
  
• Immediate political unrest from pet owners, as many pets are carnivorous and do not hunt for themselves.
• Funding organized crime through the formation of another black market.
  
• Deaths linked to the dubious safety practices of said black market.
  
• Financial cost of enforcement on a mostly unwilling public.
• Cost of prisons to contain all the new criminals.
  
• Social costs of broken families and other ripple effects caused by the incarcerations.
• Upswing in urban deer populations. (Already a problem in many areas.)
• Upswing in urban predator animal populations. (Coyotes, wolves, etc.)
• Starvation and undernourishment among disadvantaged populations. (Yes, there are people even in the west who need to hunt to eat.)
• Economic ruin for areas that rely on their fisheries or ranches for income.
• Urban migration of vast numbers of workers whose skillsets are now obsolete. (Mostly fishermen.)
• Deaths of the humans incapable of surviving on a vegan diet, or their financial ruin as a food product now suddenly has the price of a restricted pharmaceutical.
  
• Extinction of most breeds of domestic animals.
• Shortfalls and outright unavailability of many drugs that do not have non-animal sources.
• Unavailability of a massive amount of animal byproducts. (Swine by-products for example are in water filters, insulation, rubber, antifreeze, certain plastics, floor waxes, crayons, chalk, adhesives and fertilizer just to name a few.)
• Resulting increased reliance on oil.

Do insects count as meat? Insects have extremely low greenhouse gas emissions, higher rate of return of meat in relation to food used to raise them, and use much less water and space to raise.

The Indian counter-argument is absolutely wrong, the vegetarian diet has no effect on the malnutrition and poverty, in fact it makes the food that we have more sustainable. Even the people who do eat meat eat it occasionally, once or twice a week so it's not exactly a source of nutrition for them.

Look at this thread from a few years back, India has the most sustainable diet despite its poverty.

www.np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2hvk6b/global_survey_were_eating_better_but_our_diet_is/?sort=top

Also, the worldwide trends of eating meat which show that the rise in income over the years hasn't really affected India's diet that much if at all. So, there is no correlation between poverty and meat.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/meat/images/graphic_numbers_web.png

The fact of the matter is that there's no way getting around the fact meat in today's world is unethical, unnecessary and environmentally detrimental if one is truly intellectually honest with himself. So, anyone who is attempting to change your view here by claiming we're omnivores is just being defensive as this attacks their personal lifestyles. No one is denying that we can eat meat, the question is whether we should given all that we know about the industry, and there is only one correct answer to that.

I think the root of the environmental problems surrounding animal protein is due to the scale of demand and economics rather than something inherently wrong with raising food animals. There are environmentally responsible ways to raise animals for meat, milk, and eggs--there just isn't a way to do it at $2/lb and supply the entire world. If we significantly increased the cost of meat products to curb demand and make meat a luxury item would you change your view? It's worth noting too that there are many other animals that can be farmed sustainably and in high volume. Insects are being raised for meat and can be used to repurpose waste into food. Shellfish farming can be incredibly sustainable and still maintain solid outputs. While I agree animal products contribute too much to environmental degradation I definitely think there are methods to produce animal protein without harming the environment (and maybe even contributing positively to it in the total scheme) and while treating the animal with respect and fairness--just with 'one bad day'. Animals represent a way to convert (sometimes inedible) substrates into food and it shouldn't be discounted as a contributor to food security.

This will be a very different approach to your question, but if you concede that there is a moral reason for humanity to consume meat even if it is at the expense of animal suffering, then there may be reasons to continue to do so even despite alternatives.

Consider this possibility:

In the TV show, stargate, there are a race of advanced beings that have essentially become immortal by transferring their minds to clone bodies. Over the millenia, they lose the ability to reproduce and eventually die off. While that's a farfetched example, there are still parallels when it comes to this argument.

The sole reason that these animals exist in large numbers is that there is a great demand for them as food. If we move to a predominantly vegan society, we will drastically reduce their numbers and our ability to move back to animal based consumption in the event of some sort of catastrophic event that renders meat replacement harmful.

At the scale of just a hundred years or even less, moving off of meat could cull the animal herds to a point that they could not be brought back in time to prevent the destruction of all of humanity.

If we are able to feed everyone on earth sufficiently well, and the animals themselves lives goof, long and fulfilled lives, I see no reason not to eat them. Of course, that's not an argument for the meat industry as it is now, but if we ever get to that point I would have no trouble consuming meat. This also assumes we have mastered our ecosystems and have the ecological crisis firmly under control. Basically we have to be a space-faring immortal post-singularity species. But I find no reason not to eat dead things, as long as they didn't die so I could eat them. They might have been born for that, but not killed. Then I'd feel bad.

I don't find anything morally wrong with eating humans either, as long as we didn't go and kill them to eat them. So... Old people and sick people... Yeah... Doesn't sound so good, but when they're dead, they're dead. They have no use of their bodies any more. Of course, don't eat humans. You'd get sick. Sickness travels much easier between individuals of the same species. But other than that... I see no problem with it.

Of course, I still eat meat. And as such am a raging hypocrite.

From a health standpoint I see your point. However from a ecological standpoint I have to disagree. For this to work we would need to produce large amounts of grains. Grains come from grasses. So think of ecologies involving large amounts of grass. They all have to have large herds of herbivores to consume the grasses but also and very importantly they also fertilize the fields with their dung. Now if we take the place of the herbivores in a system like this we will need to fertilize the fields with human dung. This raises a significant problem with regards to disease and parasites. Herbivore herds without predator pressures are rife with disease and parasites. By taking the place of predators we keep herbivore herds healthier, remove ourselves from first line contact with pathogens and preserve soil fertility. Our problem isn't the animals as with how we are currently raising them. Feedlot animals eating row crop corn are not the future. However grass raised herbivores that are intensively managed on pasture can be a part of our future meat consumption. For more info on this look into the works of Joel Salatin.

I thought this for a while too, but a buddy of mine started studying sustainable farming practices and he (a vegetarian himself) explained why it may be better to continue livestock production, given the adoption of modern best practices. A lot of it is relatively simple (regionally appropriate livestock, less grain consumption) and some of it is more sciency than I really understood (I suggest googling it because I am not gonna be able to explain it). What it turns out to, though, is happier animals that are treated and fed better, and work in tandem with the local ecosystem. As I understand it, these kinds of farming practices can not only help reduce waste, but help revitalize the surrounding areas, and create a carbon sink which can be sold to offset the cost to both farms and consumers! Even the methane gas in animal farts can be reduced with some of this stuff.

The point being, if we can raise livestock more responsibly, meat could remain an affordable dietary staple while also not being grossly irresponsible and reducing miserable livestock conditions!

I think you may have missed something important:

Not all meat requires farming!

I live in Australia and we have a huge rabbit population. They're an invasive species, a pest and they're freaking delicious if properly cooked. Same goes for Kangaroos. I understand deer are similar in the US and Britain, they will continue to exist regardless of whether we farm them or not, and need to be actively hunted in order to reduce their impact.

Ceasing to eat meat entirely is therefore problematic! We're the only predator keeping some of these critters in check.

Removing humans as predators from the ecosystem will not help. We'll still need to kill a lot of these animals.

Long term, there will always be excess animal populations unless they go extinct, and there will always be perfectly acceptable hunted sources of meat as a result.

...And now I want 'Roo burgers.

TL;DR human predation may be excessive and overly specialized at this point, but we are still a part of the ecosystem. Removing a major predator like humanity will have flow on effects.

At the moment, there are viable efforts to grow meat cells in the lab from animal cells. This meat has been produced, cooked with and eaten. So, it's not some magically dream. It's just something that needs its price scaled down. When you factor in the cost of acquiring, feeding, raising, housing, slaughtering and butchering conventional meat, it seems reasonable that lab-grown meat could be made competitive. It seems likely that in the "long term" this alternative will be viable. When it is (1) it won't require grazing or farmland and (2) the animal suffering will be extremely minimal. At the same time, it's substantially safer from a bacteria standpoint and is, in the end, the same thing you'd get out of an animal.

Of course, that's still a setback since bones and fat and crucial flavoring components, but it's likely that if we can grow meat in a lab, we can grow those too.

So, while I think an eventual end to eating livestock is likely, an end to eating meat is not. In addition to the nutritional value, eating meat has become very culturally ingrained preference for many and part of our favorite dishes.

If you loved animals, you would eat them.

There are about 20 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, over 1 billion sheep, and just under a billion pigs. If you take away the demand for meat products, what is going to happen to all the animal populations we have. They would have to be released and cause a major shock in local ecosystems as well as a dramatic loss of population, maybe even becoming endangered since feed animals are domesticated and don't have to deal with the reality of predators on the farm.

Predator populations would swell because of the new multi billion creature injection of prey into the ecosystem, and this would have a drastic affect on the other wild prey species.

It might take decades to reach an ecological equilibrium, but history has always shown us that bringing a new species into an unfamiliar ecosystem is a disaster waiting to happen.

In my opinion the problem lies with the industry itself and how it's run, and not the practice of eating meat. Humans are omnivorous. Eating meat is good for us within reason, and along with a healthy balance of other food groups. I also don't like the idea of the government mandating whether or not meat is a viable option. I know that's not the main point, but that's a power they don't have and a right they shouldn't be able to take away. Either way, I applaud your personal reasons for wanting to not eat meat. However, if we replace the meat industries with fruit and vegetables we're still taking up that land, still harvesting trees, still destroying the Earth, it's what we do. Additionally, what would be done with former livestock animals? Without a real natural predator anymore they would rapidly over populate an area like deer and destroy the existing ecosystems. Should we kill them or wait until enough of them die out without allowing them to reproduce? Well, that sounds more inhumane than putting them to use. Animals can feel pain which is why I think there should be certain procedures and ways to handle the meat industry, but they don't have the same kind of rational and sentient higher thought processes that we do. Cows aren't sitting there thinking, "oh god, they're about to kill me and eat me." They're just wondering when the next food supply is coming and when they're going to have another calf, because it's instinctual.

We should eat what we want, but if we want to change peoples diets, so that we reduce the suffering to animals, then it actually makes sense to keep a small amount of meat in the diet.

The reason for this is to make the switch to this more plant based diet more attractive and therefore increase it's uptake. Changing the diet of the planet is a long term project.

Moving to a diet with the emphasis on plant based foods and promoting plant based meals is the fastest way to make the biggest change and so the correct moral choice is to ignore the moral issues because they are contentious and promote increasing the plant based component of our diets in order to improve our health, the evidence for which is clear.

http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet

http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/sustainable-diets-what-you-need-know-12-charts

Meat gets a bad rep because beef is not an eco-friendly protein source, but other animal foods (like chicken, eggs, fish, and dairy) are actually not that bad, environmentally speaking.

So it would probably be better for the environment, suffering of the animals and our general health

Avoid red meat and your diet is not much worse than a vegetarian diet, for the environment. The healthiest diets studied typically include some animal foods, although not a lot of red meat like is typical in the US. Vegetarian diets still cause animal suffering (eggs and dairy).

The thing is there is no sustainable way to turn everyone on the earth into vegetarians, the same way that if everyone owned an electric car it would be more damaging to the earth.

You argued about the space taken up but if everyone went vegetarian the space needed would be even more drastic.

Especially in terms of protein foods, most vegetarians need to go on fish diets because of their lack of vitamins and protein which they dont get from eating their veggies, and most protein filled vegetables cannot substitute actual protein gained from meat.

Not to mention dropping meat from ones diet could have detrimental effects on ones health because of a protein deficiency.

I agree we should ultimately stop eating meat unnecessarily at some point. Rather the senseless killing/torture of animals for our sustenance when food can be grown. I feel like its the logical conclusion the majority of people will eventually come to. I think theres some exceptions that will still be made though where eating meat is still ok, like finding the animal already dead and stuff like that where the meat can be put to good use. I am also against forcing people to not eat meat. I think thats where people will take it too far. I think it will just happen automatically and we need to let that happen and allow people free will to still eat meat if they want to.

If meat stopped being consumed by humans, the vast majority of my province and the two provinces to the west of me would suddenly become unemployed.

How are you going to handle that? Cattle farms and crop farms are totally different things with different infrastructure and equipment needs, it's not something that a farmer can just switch between without thought.

Lots of the land used by cattle farmers would be unable to grow healthy and productive crops for a long, long time. What would you suggest we do with that land instead?

There would be huge repercussions if an entire industry just stopped. How would you suggest handling that?

there's no conclusive evidence that non-human animals, while they do experience nociception, experience suffering like humans do. if you think the nociception is enough of a reason to stop raising animals and killing them for food, even insects experience nociception, and plants have physiological responses to stress too. so what do we eat if we want to eliminate distress as it relates to our consumption?

that being said, I think it would be much more reasonable to treat all living things as humanely as possible both while they are alive and when we are killing them, as well as reducing but not eliminating animal farming.

I don't see a need to give up meat entirely.

A better approach would be moderation. People need to learn you don't need meat every day, and you don't need lots of it. Additionally, much of the problem can be alleviated by preventing large companies like McDonald's from selling meat since they encourage high consumption, support factory farming, and are an unhealthy choice in general.

The issue is people are greedy (let's have meat very often), and lazy (let's get fast food). To accommodate these shortcomings in people, business has stepped in to create supply. Solving the problem means teaching people moderation.

So it would probably be better for the environment

Only if we replaced meat with a corn and wheat based diet. In reality it's more complicated, a diet based on mix of vegetables and fruits is not necessarily better for the environment.

http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/december/diet-and-environment.html

According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie.

Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon

I understand the argument for resource expenditures and animal cruelty, but if those were done away with would eating meat be fine then? Wild animals already hunt and kill other animals to sustain themselves, that's just a fact of life. So would that still be ok for people to do because it doesnt create either of those problems. Also, saying we should stop doing something entirely because there are a few negative consequences to it feels like giving up. It's a bit like saying we should all just stop driving because cars pollute, when in fact we could just work towards fixing the pollution issues.

I like your view from a utilitarian standpoint, but I think thoughts like these can often be out of touch with reality and you are arguably kicking a can down the road instead of doing what you can to fix the problem right now. I agree though that eventually we will reach a point where artificial meat is a viable and economical option but until then its short sited to think about the issue in this speculative manner as that puts the onus of progress on others. I like your mindset but I think you can draw more important conclusions than you have.

I agree in the short term but mildly disagree about the long term. This sounds odd so let me explain. Your two main points are animal suffering and red meat being carcinogenic. However, what if there was a way to get non red meat on large scales without the suffering? Surely, then that would be okay and possibly even beneficial. Scientists are already working on ways to synthesize meat in labs. Perhaps sometime in the not so distant future we will be able to have healthy meat without ever having to harm any livestock

We don't have to stop eating meat. Eating isn't the problem, it's the growing and harvesting of livestock for slaughter. If we could grow our meat in a laboratory (which is a real thing that is possible right now and we are approaching the level of technology to do it on a large scale more and more every day) we could avoid all of the problems associated with the meat industry and animal welfare, pollution or environmental destruction.

My response to the suffering of livestock:

1:
Poor conditions SHOULD be made better. Animals should have more space, better care, and humanly killed. This can be done, it is only our insistence on CHEAP meat and profits that make our animals sad.

2:
It is better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all.
It is better to be born and ground into hamburger, than never born at all.

I disagree completely.

Our ancestors, the homo erectus, were enabled to grow their brain sizes by eating meat. Including carrion and scratching the last bits of marrow out of every bone. They weren't necessarily all hunters. Anyways, there is a strong correlation between eating a lot of proteines and increasing brain size.

I believe we should strive for further development. And I don't think the needs or wants of other species should topple our (or at least my) own development goals. But that is highly subjective and I can understand that some people aren't content with indirectly killing animals. But as far as I am concerned there are the following options:

• To reduce the waste of animal life by encouraging people to eat as much as possible of an animal, including organs that aren't unhealthy but maybe are considered untasteful and including bone marrow (very important as it is very healthy). By reducing the waste less animals per population would have to be eaten while not reducing nutrition in any way. Actually people currently tend to throw away the most valuable parts of animals which is a shame.
• To develop a type of food that is at least as good as meat in terms of nutrition value, taste and affordability. I may be badly informad but afaik, meat is still king.

The only arguments that could change my view must be purely about the materialistic value for me as a human being. They must not be about the supposed emotional value regarding the suffering of lesser species.

I don't even believe that animals would suffer as much as it is portrayed by animal protectors or vegetarians/vegans, at least not here in the EU. But it doesn't concern me anyways.

Regarding the environmental consequences and usage or waste of argicultural areas for livestock I would need more information. Just a thesis is not enough, I need numbers.

I hate this argument. We're biologically evolved to eat meat. We can look for some convoluted method to avoid it and use this to say we are superior to our carnivorous brethren, but that just makes us hipsters in a man-bun.

Meat, whether traditionally pastured, factory farmed, or lab cultured, will be a staple of the human diet until there are no humans.

There are large areas around the world which are unsutable for agriculture. You can't comercially grow any vegtables on the Argentinian Pampas, the slopes of the Alps and Atlas mountains or the Central Asian plain. But herding sheep and cattle is still possible there, and doesn't use any outside resources. So why should we ban that?

The widespread death, injury, and proliferation of organized crime from prohibition and the war on drugs should be adequate evidence that a government ban on things is often worse than the thing they're banning.

If you're looking strictly at the interests of the humans involved, this is clear evidence that a ban would be harmful.

While i'm not disagreeing with you, one big factor you missed, is the idea of lab-grown meat(also called cultured meat). Within the next five to ten years, we'll be seeing lab-grown meat grow competitive with animal meat.

i'm of the opinion that we won't stop eating meat, but rather have a large-scale switch to lab-grown meat.

A lot of what you are describing is more an issue of how we go about raising beef rather than simply the idea of raising beef. I get all of my beef from a local farm that raises the cattle in a sustainable fashion. Its cheaper too, but you have to buy a 1/4 cow which pretty much necessitates a chest freezer.

Pain, is the biggest argument anti-meat people give. Almost everything living feel pain, and that includes plants. Who are we to say that a cow's pain, is somehow more wrong to give, than the pain given to a plant; is it because we can more sympathize with something that shows their pain?

Personally I consider the primary argument here the argument for animal welfare. But my counter argument to that is: why care if we kill animals for our personal pleasure? Why stop doing a practice just because it requires suffering, death of a being that can feel pain and fear death?

There are a lot of things being said here and I acknowledge that I am not addressing them all, but I do not have time to research everything.

I am assuming that when you say we would become vegetarian, you mean we would be able to still eat milk products and eggs, but no actual animal flesh in any way. If that is not the case some of the below will make no sense, but I think my assumption is correct as it is the most logical. Maybe no eggs because they can be pretty cruel, but I think milk can easily be done cruelty free. Irrelevant for the bulk of what I can say.

What is the food source after we switch to a vegetarian world diet? Soy is probably the most likely candidate because of the ease of growth and protein content, but what else would you use as the base for diet? There are two problems with becoming a single crop as the base of our diet. The first is that fields need to rest. You cannot grow the same crop year after year or all the nutrients are sucked out of the field. You can nuke the field with fertilizer, but that has far worse ramifications on several fronts and cannot be a permanent solution. I know you can rotate wheat with corn and soybeans, but I am not sure if you can take out the corn in that rotation. Also, if we do use wheat, then we are increasing carb intake, which seems to be becoming more and more accepted as the real problem with diets. The next issue comes up from the inherent risk of a lack of food source diversity, which is that you have no source of mitigating from a blight. If you get a wet/dry season, insects, disease, whatever, a homogeneous crop will not give you as much protection as having multiple crops would. Odds are you could not kill the world supply, but it is reasonable to think a disease could wipe out the breadbasket in the US.

Another thing to think about is that the actual land that livestock use is generally not great farmland. So we could increase available farmland vastly by switching to all grass fed livestock. Pigs eat scraps, so they do not matter. I know nothing about chickens, but birds are evil, so fuck them. In all reality, even the corn cows eat is mostly by-product of corn we have taken the usable parts out of, so even the farmland they use for food is used by humans still, but I am not going to cite or defend that, so it is something to think about, but if you do not believe me, fine.

There is more I am thinking about, but I have to get back to work. One last thing though, how do we control animal populations if we do not eat any meat?

We won't need to ban meat once we learn how to grow the animal muscle in the lab for cheap. Research is going into this field and it would require much less land, water, and have less of an environmental footprint.

There are certain people who have digestive conditions that make it unhealthy for them not to eat at least some meat, so we will still have to feed some people meat, at least as what is effectively medicine.

I can't not eat meat. I'm allergic to wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, and nuts. If you have to make an exception for me you will have to make an exception for other people.

Eat insects.

fast reproduction, nutritious, significantly better for environment, need less resources, and less problems with PETA/ militant vegans

dairy cows suffer quite a bit as well, and also take up space just like the beef ones, why do you think we should go vegetarian but not vegan.

A majority of your claims are negated if we consider lab-grown meat, which is quickly becoming more commercially viable

What about people with eating disorders? Should they stop eating meat, even if it causes health problems to them?

But, we know ours do exist for eating meat. Once past the age of 4, we generally don't use ours for fighting.

It will be inherently difficult to eliminate one of the few true joys in life. Even if banned outright, there will always be a lucrative black market for bacon, steak, ribs, etc.

I would much rather we reduce the amount of humans then have to sacrifice eating meat.