Eating pigs & poultry requires less than 5% of land than beef. Eating something more sustainable is not equal to reducing the human experience. That's just your taste buds talking.
You could say, that the only way to have the entire human experience, is to eat carnivores (lions, anyone?).
With carnivore diet how many people you think the planet would support?
Would there be a place for yourself, now?
What about your children and children of your children? For wildlife? For nature?
And there will be some way of eating that requires 5% of the land of whatever you suggest, ad infinitum, until we have tens of billions of humans and we end up back at square one.
A line in the sand will be drawn somewhere, here's mine. I don't believe in infinite growth, it will result in us all drinking Soylent in cages.
The objective for me is to have a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people, not a low quality of life for the maximum amount possible.
We don't even have enough room to supplement the current population on western version of meat-eating diet. We already use more land for beef production, than we have forests.
> until we have tens of billions of humans
Agree, we have to abandon our current notions of growth, if we want to preserve life for future generations. On our current path we're going to hell (too many things to enumerate here).
> a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people
Plant-based diet means a higher quality of life for everyone - people, animals, wildlife.
I for one would rather have more forests, than beef burger packaged in plastic.
If you think that we handle animals humanly, please see Dominion (2018) movie [https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch]. If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
Just chiming in to add my support for your arguments. I enjoy fast food and drinking beer, and all the moreso when I know that the former is plant-based and that the latter is brewed in an environmentally-friendly manner. I believe that both of those are possible in ways that make better use of existing agricultural land and that are therefore more scalable in terms of provision-of-nutrition -- although transition can be tricky and involves battling vested interests and long-held opinions and preferences.
I believe your debating partner is presenting false dichotomies regarding resource consumption and distribution.
It's not possible to argue in good faith if you're just going to resort to "taste buds" nonsense.
Of course if there's zero benefit then we should expend no cost on something. You may as well argue that we don't need literature, art, friends and family, freedom, sex, etc. It's just your brain cells and neurotransmitters, right.
If you don't care about eating meat, that's cool. I'm glad - genuinely - it's scarce, so the more of you there are, the better off I am.
>If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
I watched it and it didn't change a thing. I used to behead chickens to help grandma back in the days. Thinking that a video will suddenly make me a soylent chugging vegan is nothing short of religious zealotry.
As a young boy I too was taught how to kill rabbits and poultry by my grandparents.
As a city boy I was chasing my screaming village nephews with a rabbit eye all over the grounds.
I've spent few summers around cowhouse and young calfs, "helping" my aunt take care of them.
I've killed and cleaned few fish for christmas.
The animals I watched killed were living good life and there was no suffering at the end.
So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
But I've never been around slaughterhouse or in a highly industrialized meat production facility. Even now many people in cities don't know where milk comes from (yes, they know it's from cows, but they don't know that you have to artificially inseminate the cow and take away the calves, and they never heard them crying for days).
The amount of suffering, brutality and aggression of slaughterhouse staff, the supposedly human ways of killing our food, the long, painful and stressful process of killing, the amount of screaming of distressed animals, skinning of alive animals - documented in the Dominion (2018) movie - I was not prepared for that.
But that's not what made me vegan. I've seen it long after I've become vegan.
I'm not advocating for soylent (soylent green is people, anyhow).
But it is an argument for changing our practices, because it shows that propaganda of meat industry (happy cows & meals in burger joints, pictures of cows grazing in the fields on supermarket shelves, etc.) is just a big lie. And that we simply don't know how to kill painlessly.
Few quotes:
If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. [Howard Lyman]
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. [Paul McCartney]
Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced. [Peter Singer]
>The animals I watched killed were living good life and there was no suffering at the end.
>So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
Now this is something I haven't heard before from a vegan. Does this mean that in principle, you'd have no problems eating an animal you are 100% sure died in a dignified, painless way because you killed it that way?
No, I've been taught that to survive/be healthy we need to eat meat. So I didn't question it (for several decades).
The idea of animals happily living on the farm somewhere and their painless/swift death is a part of the lie. The reality ... is of course much, much worse.
I've become vegan because of other people (not enough space for everybody to eat same amount of meat as westerners do), because of the loss of biodiversity (such shame to erase so many "cumulative billions of years of dna code generation") and because of meat production's adverse effects on the environment.
Health and moral aspects came later, for me.
Now that I know (and verified it myself) that we the people in fact don't need animal products to be healthy, that quite the opposite is true, that we don't need to cause unnecessary suffering for our own livehood, I'm not interested in eating animal products anymore.
It may change if our civilization collapses. For now ... with the plants available ... no, thank you.
That's really arguing against your own strawman. How will living well bellow your means cause extreme population growth? Living above your means while depleting resources is not constraining future resource problems.
The basic argument that I am living above my means by eating meat relies on the idea that I should consume 1 / 8 billion of the Earth's resources.
I reject that. I've spent my life outcompeting others in order to ensure that this is not the case - if you want to eat bugs, crack on. Meat could cost 10x what it does and I'd still smash it on the daily.
You could say, that the only way to have the entire human experience, is to eat carnivores (lions, anyone?).
With carnivore diet how many people you think the planet would support?
Would there be a place for yourself, now?
What about your children and children of your children? For wildlife? For nature?
Come on, grow up, people.