Increasing the number of vegetarians is also effectively an investment in sustainable, ethical farming. You can only make the raising of live animals for their flesh so resource efficient, the floor on resource consumption is still going to be above that for farming produce.
You could invest in the research on vat meat, which could bring the floor down a lot lower than is possible with live animals, but it’ll probably be decades before it reaches a point where anyone would want to eat it.
If you want to take about resource efficiency, we should probably start by eating what we produce. A quick Google turned up this report that 40% of the food produced in the US is thrown out as waste.
You know, I read that back in college, was properly outraged, resolved to eat all the food I served myself for every meal and never serve myself more than I would eat from then on, have done so ever since, and then proceeded to forget my original reason for doing so? That figure had passed out of my mind until you brought it up just now.
That said, the efficiency gap, while large, is still considerably less than that between raising meat and produce, so a person would actually be wasting fewer resources if they were eating only produce and served themselves a 40% excess beyond what they could eat and then threw it way than if they were eating a meal where meat constituted a significant proportion of the serving, and took only as much as they could finish.
That’s a pretty fringe harm.
Increasing the number of vegetarians is also effectively an investment in sustainable, ethical farming. You can only make the raising of live animals for their flesh so resource efficient, the floor on resource consumption is still going to be above that for farming produce.
You could invest in the research on vat meat, which could bring the floor down a lot lower than is possible with live animals, but it’ll probably be decades before it reaches a point where anyone would want to eat it.
If you want to take about resource efficiency, we should probably start by eating what we produce. A quick Google turned up this report that 40% of the food produced in the US is thrown out as waste.
You know, I read that back in college, was properly outraged, resolved to eat all the food I served myself for every meal and never serve myself more than I would eat from then on, have done so ever since, and then proceeded to forget my original reason for doing so? That figure had passed out of my mind until you brought it up just now.
That said, the efficiency gap, while large, is still considerably less than that between raising meat and produce, so a person would actually be wasting fewer resources if they were eating only produce and served themselves a 40% excess beyond what they could eat and then threw it way than if they were eating a meal where meat constituted a significant proportion of the serving, and took only as much as they could finish.