I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
A lot more water to make the food for cows than what humans consume.
A lot more food to feed a cow than what it would take to feed the human the same type of food.
And the growth of that food to keep feeding these animals in large batch is pretty much creating dead areas of land that gets ruined if it’s not carefully monitored. And the run off into the water supply is a problem. This is why industrial level of farming is really really bad for the environment.
You’re supposed to move cattle around in pastures for regrowth and not entirely decimate it. The capitalists do not care about that until a court summons tells them to care about that.
Currently there’s some better methods however the consumption stays high.
Health wise : all meat diets (meat at every meal) can produce issues in your body.
Cured meat or heavy salted meat can lead to heart issues and kidney stones.
You should mix in some fruit and vegetables and maybe even substitute some entire meals so that meat is consumed only a few times a week if only for your body’s sake. Your taste buds aren’t the same organ as your heart. They aren’t the organs that make your body stay alive.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
won’t eat
Is not the point of the argument when we’re taking about what humans shouldn’t eat. We can’t cater to wants anymore when growing percentage are starving.
can’t eat
Which is bullshit. We didn’t invent their diet. we substituted it. They might eat grass but we eat plenty of other green substitutes. The amount we consume of it doesn’t come close to their needs though.
cows eat mostly grass but, for instance, poultry are fed a lot of soy. that soy is usually (almost always) in the form of so-called “soy meal” or “soy cake”, but that is actually a waste product from pressing soybeans for oil. it would be industrial waste if we didn’t feed it to livestock.
~This is false. Cows in the US are primarily fed corn. Not the can’t/won’t eat stuff.~
Edit: I am wrong. They said only fed about 8% human edible grain.
most cows eat mostly grass most of their lives. they also eat silage. and yes there is corn, but that’s not the bulk of any cows diet
The point is that you can grow a plant based diet for a human for much less resource cost than you could for a cow.
Multiplied by the amount our current meat industry runs at and you get decimation of large swaths of lands, much higher emission of greenhouse gasses, etc…
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
