I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
No… No… The studies account for that. Most cattle in the US are fed human quality base ingredient feed… It’s much cheaper to feed them corn meal than anything else. (I say base ingredient because the standard on cattle feed as a whole is not human grade, but the bulk of the food, the corn, could be human grade if it had been processed for humans instead of cattle.)
The water numbers are pretty well understood.
show me one study that accounts for that.
I read your other post using poor and nemeck and even that article shows it.
if you can cite where in that article it gives credit to cattle for conserving water that would be wasted, I would eat my hat.
so how much water do they say cows consume through cotton?
You are making this argument: https://hoards.com/article-20263-lets-end-the-feed-versus-food-debate.html
You want me to peer review the article and check that they did what they claim they did? That they actually recorded the water use at each step?
that article is awesome
no. I just want to see how much water they say cows consumed from cotton and the total amount of water they say was used to grow the cotton. and then I want you to ask yourself if it’s reasonable to attribute ANY of that water to cows (it isn’t)
Not trying to be a dick here, but do you honestly think that you, a non-expert who likely doesn’t even practice in ecology or environmental sciences, are the authority here on whether any studies have attempted to account for the water consumption based on the feed variety and sources?
Because if you thought of it as a way to shoot down a random internet comment, then the experts who work in the field have certainly done so and followed through with those calculations already. Have you ever met a professor? They fucking love to tear apart arguments because it gets their names into publications and that’s how they earn tenure and notoriety for grant funding.
you have no idea what my background is. this is just an appeal to authority.