These transformations are tied to the changing American diet. Since the early 1980s, America’s per-person cheese consumption has doubled, largely in the form of mozzarella-covered pizza pies. And last year, for the first time, the average American ate 100 pounds of chicken, twice the amount 40 years ago.
We need to take a whole-cloth look at how agribusiness operates. Why is there so much outrage over resources we’re using to farm chicken, which as you pointed out are lower calorie-for-calorie than beef, but crickets for the resources we’re wasting on growing alfalfa in Arizona.
No, that sounds disgusting!
I don’t know where this push for eating bugs came from, it’s not a valid solution
No because you have to feed every calorie to an animal to get animal proteins. So maybe you’re grazing animals on land that can’t produce human edible plants, but most of the grain and soy grown in America is grown as feed. We could be using the corn fields of the Midwest to grow human food
Produce less people. Reducing the per person carbon production is meaningless when we keep adding people. In 1950, there way 1/3rd less people and less than half the number of Americans.
We have eaten animal protein for millennia. It was instrumental to our evolution. It’s only a problem now that we have way too many people
We’re already reducing population. In order to stave off disaster without atrocity we will need to accept lifestyle changes. Groundwater issues are a problem now, not in a generation. And there have been vegans and vegetarians for millennia too.
Growth is slowing, but we are far from reducing. The numbers continue to climb: https://www.census.gov/popclock/world
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Most people aren’t going to stop eating meat, that’s an unrealistic expectation. If you’re telling people that eating chicken over beef isn’t good enough they will shrug their shoulders and go right back to beef.
Most people will stop eating meat, once they realize that all of their needs are met by vegetarian-only cafeterias at their schools and its cheaper
I don’t think reducing human culinary culture down to only what is the most efficient per calorie per acre food is a laudable goal. If there is a ground water crisis, maybe the solution is to produce food in sustainable locations, ban food exports, and profit from food.
Some foods like cheese can also be made much more efficiently than with cows milk with new biotechnologies. There are a handful of companies that turn sugar water into cows milk using specially engineered yeast. https://perfectday.com/process/
This is a farming/regulation problem. Not a consumption problem. Almonds are a similar food grown where they shouldn’t be.
And the push for Americans to stop eating meat and switch to eating bugs lives on… disgusting
