Of course on the other hand: wouldn't it be amazingly convenient for the meat industry if just as a massive drought was bringing forth a renewed wave of criticism against the wastefulness of alfalfa for feed; with factory farms being heavily criticized as horrifying cruel; antibiotics in animal feed being blamed for bringing about the MRSApocalypse; hormones being blamed for... well just about anything; along with shit lagoons destroying the environment and cowfarts destroying the ozone layer there was a sudden rush of studies showing that you should be eating more meat.
I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing.
Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.
It's not a question of 'is meat bad for the planet'. It's that the internet seems to be full of people who fancy themselves sharp-minded critical-thinking skeptics running around accusing Big-Ag of motivated reasoning with regards to carbohydrates while ignoring that meat production is part of Big-Ag and has just as much cause for motivated reasoning.
Yeah, fair enough. Honestly any single study is also just goddamn meaningless -- it's really impossible to draw any conclusions from most any study without the context of the rest of the field to judge the quality and implications of a particular paper. Pushing a single study is usually either disingenuous (on the part of anyone with financial interest) or irresponsible (on the part of media/blogger sensationalists).
I personally find it more amusing that the internet is so friendly towards "big organic". :-)
Err, in this hypothetical, wouldn't that be the case for vegetables as well? Some vegetables would not be as efficient to grow as the most efficient meats, thus you would want to focus on the efficient vegetables...etc
Fresh vegetables are typically only labelled by society as 'fresh vegetables' because they're so calorie-poor you'd need a fridge full of the stuff every day to feed someone enough calories that they don't lose weight. Efficient calories don't often get called 'vegetables', but some sort of essential staple food. Vegetables average around 100 calories per pound: http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/cal-par/calorie-paradox1...
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Calories we can produce really, really well with various techniques:
It's almost certainly true for some vegetables, but I'm not sure any of those crops account for a majority of a vegetarian diet. Soybean, corn, potatoes, rice and wheat are like, really awesome.
But "let's not use any animal products at all" is a much harder sell. "Hey, if you eat mostly chicken and pork with just the occasional steak or burger on a special occasion you can get like 50%+ of the environmental benefits" is a much more plausible way forward for the US.
"Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce"
Citation needed.
Beef can live on range-lands that aren't good for much else and requires very low inputs. If we didn't have a taste for grain fed finished animals it would almost certainly be many times as efficient as pork.
That is an excellent point: while pork is more efficient on a per-calorie basis and a per-acre usage (because you can pack pigs into a factory and feed them corn & soy beans, two of the most space-efficient crops), you can't discount that land is not fungible.
There definitely is land that is only useful (agriculturally) for grazing. There will be a subset of this land for which the tradeoffs favor grazing (there may be some land we could technically graze but as a society prefer not to, eg, to conserve water resources or leave an area "wild"), and there's no reason to not produce beef just because it's inefficient in other contexts.
Pork also has a niche like that -- you can feed pigs food waste. Some food waste can simply be eliminated and you always have the option to just compost food waste, but there is a non-negligible amount of necessary food waste (slightly spoiled produce, table scraps, etc). If you could efficiently funnel all of this food waste into pork production, you could reclaim those calories.
I mean. You know. It plays both ways.