I saw your post On The Third Hand.
I agree.
They’re tearing down valuable resources so that they can produce meat more cheaply and with greater profits.
That’s an interesting claim. I have two thoughts:
A: While people are cutting down the rainforest, they don’t NEED to do so. There is already sufficient land grow all the cattle feed anyone could need. They are cutting down the forest because it is cheap land, you can thank those wonderful market forces (this relates to farm subsidies). It makes no more sense to blame meat eating than to blame someone who wants a wooden door stopper for a logger cutting down a redwood and shaving down 99% of it to produce one.
B: You’re simply wrong. While Brazil is indeed destroying its rainforests, they are not doing it because of people who eat meat. A large part of they soy is for human consumption. That’s right soy milk, the staple of every vegetarian diet, causing rainforest destruction. Are you going to stop using soy products? Somehow I doubt it.
Sadly, Grimmy, you're wrong.
Much of the new demand for soya is from cattle farmers (especially Europeans).
While it's true that vegetarians eat soy, too, human consumption of soy and other plants is a very efficient use of land. It takes far, far more land to grow crops to feed them to animals for people to eat than it does just to grow crops for people to eat. If people stopped eating meat, we could feed the world easily using less land for agriculture than is already in use. The conversion of grains into meat via ranching is an extraordinarily wasteful process.
So, if people stopped eating beef, there would be a glut of soya and the market price would drop to the point that there would be no incentive to clear-cut the rainforest.
Ergo, your decision to eat meat has a direct impact on the clear-cutting of the rainforest.
Regards,
W.C. Varones
There's an interesting mistake involving the use of "meet" and "meat" in Mr. Varones' previous comment.
As noted in Strunk & White, there is a marked difference between "I would like to meet that girl" and "I would like to meat that girl".
I am a vegetarian.
Because the "meet" I eat are vegetarian.
Zeke & IPF-
Thanks for catching that.
I can edit the comments, though, so like anything unpleasant in French history, it never happened.
Regards,
W.C. Varones
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