Meat needed to sustain life
July 29, 2009 by Cyndi Young
Filed under Feature Programs, Two Cents
Animal rights activists who prefer a world where our dinner plates are free of meat are not living in the real world. We simply do not have enough land on this planet to raise enough fruits and vegetables to sustain life for 7 billion people.I support farmers and farming, which includes farmers who choose to grow products for niche markets. I believe there should be a premium paid to farmers for the extra costs involved with specialty production.If animal rights activists have it their way, farmers will not receive a premium; there will not be enough food for the population; and the price of food will skyrocket.
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That is the most absurd assertion I have ever read. I’m not even a animal-rights activist or a vegetarian.
We simply do not have enough land on this planet to raise enough fruits and vegetables to sustain life for 7 billion people.
Would someone please pass the Soylent Green?
Oh, good one. I actually had to google Soylent Green to find out about it!
I don’t know where you’re getting your information from and if you had to google Soylent Green you’re probably very young and have a lot to learn about life. I’ve been a vegan for 10 years and I’m more healthy, in shape and more active than ever before. If meat is needed to sustain life, I should be dead.
Aside from the fact that vegetarian/vegan diets are just as healthy, if not healthier than a meat-based diet (you should google that), it requires more land, energy and crops to sustain meat-eating (not to mention the environmental devastation and increase in greenhouse gas emissions) than a plant-based diet. For every 100 grams of protein consumed by a cow, only 10 grams of meat protein is produced. That’s a loss of 90%. If everyone went vegetarian/vegan, there would actually be more food available – enough to feed the world’s hungry – instead of it being converted into animal protein.
Even if people reduced their meat intake by 10% it would free enough grain to feed 60 million people.
I’d suggest doing a little more research on the subject next time.
I eat meat with every meal and even I can’t fathom the ignorance of this statement! What do you think the animals we eat are raised on? How much do you think they consume?
That has to be the most ignorant statement ever made! Consuming animals is the LEAST efficient use of resources, making the most unsustainable diet in the world. It takes 16 or more pounds of grain to make 1 pound of beef and over 1000 gallons of water, not to mention the fuel needed to also get that meat from farm to feedlot to slaughter to the store. You need to look at http://www.eatinggreen.org to get a clue. Then, lets look at the pollution from all of that poop and gas created by animals, the obesite, the heart disease, etc…. Some people will just believe anything to continue eating animals and feel good about it. Look at America, all of the fat, sick people driving us to the brink of financial disaster and you’ll see how great an animal based diet is. How much misery and suffering can we create?
WHOA. Please listen to the program before commenting. I think you just read the title and made a judgement call. I am not suggesting that every individual must eat meat to sustain individual life. There are a lot of healthy, happy vegetarians running around. They just have to manage their diet to be sure nutritionally they are getting what their bodies need from other sources.
Big picture: on this planet, we cannot grow enough plant material in the long term to nutritionally satisfy a world population. We need meat.
We simply do not have enough land on this planet to raise enough fruits and vegetables to sustain life for 7 billion people
Cyndi, you just keep repeating the same “factoid”: “We simply do not have enough land on this planet to raise enough fruits and vegetables to sustain life for 7 billion people”
Where is this coming from? You’ve yet to back this up with any figures or references.
Daniel (above), however, clearly stated: “it requires more land, energy and crops to sustain meat-eating (not to mention the environmental devastation and increase in greenhouse gas emissions) than a plant-based diet. For every 100 grams of protein consumed by a cow, only 10 grams of meat protein is produced. That’s a loss of 90%. If everyone went vegetarian/vegan, there would actually be more food available – enough to feed the world’s hungry – instead of it being converted into animal protein.”
Read that, please, and if you would like to refute those figures, please do so. “We need meat” isn’t a clear statement, especially considering the amount of land, feed, and water required to *produce* that meat. It is, hands down, an inefficient usage of all the resources involved. (Yes, I eat meat, but I absolutely advocate a reduction in meat consumption.)
Why is it that such small things bother us so much?
They are animals for god sake. It is insanity to be debating this.
Animals do not “debate” if they should eat us or not. It’s protein for us.
what’s done is done.
Cyndi, You said: “There are a lot of healthy, happy vegetarians running around,” but then say we need meat to nutritionally satisfy a world population. This is a contradiction.
You also said: “We simply do not have enough land on this planet to raise enough fruits and vegetables to sustain life for 7 billion people.”
Consider this: Nearly a third of all Central American rainforests have been cleared to make pasture for cattle. Seventy per cent of all cleared Amazon rainforest is used for grazing cattle and most of the remaining 30% is used to grow animal feed (and we’re losing another 50 million acres every year).
The U.S. has lost more than a third of its topsoil to erosion from animal grazing and growing crops for cattle and other livestock. Roughly 7 football fields of land are bulldozed every minute to create more room for farming animals. One acre of land produces 165 pounds of beef OR 20,000 pounds of potatoes.
Fifty-six million acres of land in the U.S. is used to produce hay (yes, hay) for livestock whereas 4 million acres of land is used to produce vegetables for humans. The amount of land needed to feed a pure vegetarian for a year is 1/6 of an acre while the amount of land needed to feed a meat-eater for a year is 3 1/4 acres (or about 20 times as much). Reducing or eliminating meat consumption would feed MORE people and require LESS land to do so.
Food for thought.
Reducing or eliminating meat consumption would cause more people to go hungry. We need both animals and plants to feed the world and to manage natural resources. Here in the U.S., somewhere around half the land cannot be used for growing crops. It can be used for grazing. If not used for grazing, the land would be of no use as a food resource for people.