Quote:
Originally Posted by boo boo
Meat does use up a lot of resources, that's not much of an argument. But if everyone was a vegetarian, there would be a higher demand for such foods and overall we'd be using around the same amount of resources we've been using to feed livestock. So I don't think that's a very good argument at all.
Eating grass really would be the only alternative, and I don't even think the most obsessed vegans would be very fond of that idea.
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Hmm, I'm not sure if you really understand the resources argument. Maybe it takes a little explaining in general. Consider this :
When an animal eats food, not all of that food is gonna help build up that animal. The animal needs to fuel biochemical processes, needs to keep warm, needs energy to move around - most of the food is gonna be used in maintenance costs and so on. So, to illustrate.
Let's say we have a simple food web like this : fish > seal > polar bear
Let's stay clear of numbers for a little longer and just say that in order for a seal to become adult, it has to eat a ****load of fish over an extended period of time. A lot of the resources the seal gets from eating the fish are spent on other things, like producing cubs, swimming, staying warm, etc. Now, a polar bear has to eat lots of seals again to become an adult and while it is extremely efficient with energy storage, it's situation is the same as that of the seal - it's gonna spend a lot of it on other things than just growing muscles and fat.
These numbers are silly, but just imagine this : a 100 kg seal has eaten 10000 kilos of fish to become that large. A polar bear has to eat 1000 kilos of seal to become 100 kg polar bear.
In other words, it takes 100 000 kilos of fish to make 100 kilos of polar bear. Each kilo of polar bear that you eat was, down the line if you cut out the seals, fed up on 1000 kilos fish. Now to the point, what if you cut out the polar bear
and the seal and just eat the fish? It's a lower level in the food chain and it takes much less resources. It takes 1 kilo of fish to give you 1 kilo of fish to eat.
The point is exactly the same and even more so for cows eating grass. It takes a lot of grass to make a 100 kilos cow. At least 10 000 kilos. Instead of using 10 square kilometres for growing grass for cow consumption, you could perhaps use 1 square kilometre to grow corn and end up with the same amount of food.