[mauflows]

We don't need meat.

And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.

[hedora]

Meat is more useful than low energy density gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions than regular gasoline.

Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error.

The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change.

That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.

[r00fus]

Ethanol is a straw man argument. The option is a) not to produce so much corn and b) not to feed it to animals for slaughter.

We can grow other things, and we can eat less meat.

[kickout]

We don't need programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc. But we like them.

[CydeWeys]

The point is that, if the alternative is massive global starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc., to do so.

[Gordonjcp]

> We don't need meat.

We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.

[mauflows]

> We do if we want everyone to eat

This is not true. There is plenty of food, especially if we put all resources we currently feed livestock into feeding humans.

[riversflow]

You know that we share the earth with every other species right? How about we let that stuff we cant eat be food for wild animals?

[goatlover]

We don't need coffee, tea, spices and a thousand other things you can buy at the store. But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

>But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.

This will change when we'll have to make compromise because our current agriculture model is not sustainable (both for climate and food production).

As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if you're reducing meat consumption).

[credit_guy]

> We don't need meat.

But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.

[qiskit]

> We don't need meat.

We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential.

Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat.

Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.

[merry_flame]

Pure Meiji anti-Buddhist propaganda. Read up.

[samatman]

You don't get to make decisions for me on the basis of what is necessary from your perspective.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

What is meat necessary for, other than proteins and iron? Taste? Tradition?

Also, what decisions are you talking about? OP said one does not need meat. Isn't that a provable fact?