The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare, but if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.
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Published figures from CSIRO and other sources in relation to Australia suggest that producing wheat and other grains to service a vegetarian/vegan diet results in at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein, more environmental damage and a great deal more animal cruelty.
Full Paper - https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2011.051
TLDR: Meat results in 25x less death per kg of protein vs plant based protein sources.
The practical aspects of protein sources can be shocking sometimes like this paper. We need to improve agricultural practices to minimize cruelty.
As the human population increases I think we probably have to turn to some algal or single cell protein to produce good quality nutrients on scale.
Agreed, get back to regenerative methods that are in sync with natural biocycles without external inputs.
As long as it is demonstrably (rct) a strictly positive replacement for natural whole food sources without any downsides (such as miss-shaped sterols, lectins, etc)
Bioavailability should be considered too, when weighing the costs.
What worries me even with regenerative agriculture is that we will be pulling biomass out of it and not returning it until or unless we work out how to make our waste safe and return it to the land.
Energy is a free input from sunlight, and some nitrogen is captured from air, but anything we take out at the moment is very slow to return
That is true! I think the more sophisticated waste processing plants do send the solids out as fertilizer