this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.
Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Not scaling could be a feature and not a bug. It would raise the price of beef and thus lower demand.
To an extent, yes it would likely do that. Though on the other hand running into the maximum capacity limitations would not look pretty. Even countries that have a just bit higher grass-fed production than others have a fair number of issues (and still use plenty of supplemental grain)
For instance, in New Zealand, they use a massive amount of synthetic fertilizer on grasslands to try to make it keep up for dairy production
https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806
Or in the UK and Ireland where grass-fed production leads to deforestation and they still need additional grain on top of it
https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014
the first time in probably a year i've seen someone explain supply and demand correctly. thank you.
What?!?
It doesn't mean that you must supply me with everything I demand?!?!
A huge aspect of this is ranchers not cycling their land and allowing it to regrow native grasses properly, which does end up running into the land use problem again. But right now we're very unoptimized with land regrowth and there's a huge difference that can be made with just properly handling the land and to stop ranching in literal deserts.
we need to feed them corn and soybeans because people want lots and lots of meat, and that's the best way to get lots and lots of meat.
that's.. kinda why people advocate for eating less meat, so that there won't be such a powerful incentive to turbomaximize meat yields to meet the huge demand..
Well, it's not "growing" per se, but we produce fertilizers which are "plant food", so you could say we grow food for our food even for plants.
we don't. but we do grain finish most cattle, because it's faster.
My partner and I reduced our red meat intake but I don't think I could stop completely. A steak a few times a year just hits the spot too much. I'm keen for lab grown though.
How dare you ask people to change literally any habit they have! It's obviously someone else's responsibility to change!
i find it annoyingly ironic how you’re acting like these people are behaving in some absurd manner when you’re, at the same time, asking an even more absurd thing of humanity by demanding the majority of people concurrently start behaving differently regardless of their privilege or economic status.
i swear to fucking christ every single person banging the individual activism drum in environmentalist circles is some corpo plant or something. do you not understand the vast majority of people who contribute personally to climate change by ignoring these suggested principles don’t really have a choice? sure, it’s john’s fault personally that the only economically viable way he can feed himself in the local food desert is calories from beef…
it isn’t a matter of morals or will - what you are asking or hoping for is functional impossible and has not happened once in human history, ever. even if all people agreed with these ideas and somehow magically got on the individual action horse, it wouldn’t fucking matter. because what makes individual action not work is systemic and has nothing to do with the moral quality of the choices people are making or their personal opinions and has everything to do with harsh economic realities that can’t be whimsically subverted by shaming people for the sins of corporate America.
Lol this is ridiculous.
Have fun completely abdicating your agency and making absurd rants though, I guess
P.S. no one argues that people should make personal changes in lieu of government/business changes. This is another bad faith assertion people make to attempt to abdicate personal responsibility.
My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.
My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today's society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.
If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You'd think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they're the ones who want the subsidy the most.
Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.
We should push for large institutional change, but don't ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren't also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change
Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There's been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns
I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.
Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you'll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.
I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.
Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.
If it’s any consolation, at least a kilo of coffee is many more servings than a kilo of beef.
it wouldn't be very scientific but it'd be nice to have a graph like this with co2equivalent per serving
Same here. I only eat beef a few times a year as a treat both for health and environmental reasons. But coffee and chocolate so high up the list is more of a killer for me. I definitely enjoy a couple cups per day as well as at least one bite of dark chocolate. Probably should cut back now that I can't claim ignorance.
I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.
Hence the bumper sticker that has been around since the 70s
REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
Homesteaders and locally grown meat is a necessary way of life for those living in the country. CAFOs and suburban grillers can burn in hell.
I think it’s also a bit of a thing where most people treat it like a binary.
They either think you have to go full on vegetarian or you eat meat.
When what we should really be encouraging most people to do is cut down on meat. (You’re gonna have a lot less sucess if you ask them to straight up stop).
I eat meat and it has very little impact. I hunt.
Fuck your gatekeeping and special pleading
But they fly for a vacation?
This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.
See, OP is not saying we should "just drop red meat", and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.
What people are saying is that their habits are negligible because companies pollute much more.
But sure, try to shame the little guy who might be doing their negligible effort instead of going after the big polluters, that'll help a lot.
most people don't want to eat grass or soy cake. letting cows graze, and feeding soycake (the byproduct of soybean oil production) to pigs and poultry is a conservation of resources.
not all land is suitable for crops. letting cattle graze it is fine.
this is a strawman
this conversation didn't happen.
Don’t bother with this fucking guy. They’re in every thread about eating less meat arguing that eating meat is best. I’ve already gotten tricked into replying several times in the past.
Don’t feed the trolls.
Good news is that overall arable farmland usage goes down the less meat you eat. Don't need to use all the same land, you have flexibility to move around production
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
I don't think that has ever happened.
It's worth noting that soybean meal is not a byproduct. When we look at the most common extraction method for soybean oil (using hexane solvents), soybean meal is still the driver of demand
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926669017305010
This is even more true of other methods like expelling which is still somewhat commonly used
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/9/5/87
hexane solvents are not the most common method of oil extraction. you have been misinformed.
some studies show soybean oils being as much as half the value of the crop, despite being just 20% of the weight.
If we assume that's the case, half of revenue is still not a byproduct, it's a coproduct. The other half is still pretty relevant to its value and usage. If 50% of your revenue disappears from something, you're going to be making a lot less of it
i think at this point we've devolved into arguing semantics. you're not going to convince me soybean is a viable crop unless you can press it for oil, and i don't think i can convince you it's a viable product unless the meal is fed to livestock. but i hope you have a good night!
What are you talking about? Soy is great. Soy beans, soy curls, tofu, soy milk, soy sauce, miso. All kinds of great soy products.