Y'all some hungry mofos. That counter zipped thru 13 million poor tasty, little critters while I was on that page. The cattle numbers seemed low relative to others. Maybe because they are larger and each feeds more individuals.
What about normal game animals like deer, squirrel, wild turkey, rabbit, dove, quail, pigeon, etc? I think this site only gives a glimpse of the true scope of animal deliciousness.
I also disagree with the numbers since most look they are wild-ass guesses intended to inflate or mislead so as to cause those of us who consume all this delicious meat to switch to more sensitive plants, insects, or algae, or fungi.
Imagine the numbers you'd have to report if you were accurately reporting seed consumption of typical grains, legumes, leafy vegetables, herbs (which are delicious with meats), and spices and all the other things that vegetarians or vegans profess such deep attractions to that they can ignore all the destruction wrought by the agricultural practices relevant to their foodstocks. Some of the agricultural lands being tallied are used for growing crops like soybeans for consumption as pseudo-meat by vegans who couldn't be morally outraged enough about habitat loss for their beany things to worry about their own destructive impact on mother earth.
What happens to the collective consciousness of a fungal colony when someone comes along and rips off a few warty things for their supper? Do you think that the fungus stores a memory of the event and the participants so that once they finally hit the dirt that memory can pass along the subterranean chain so that the fungus can move in return the favor?
Agreed. It's called "human consumption", but it neither relates to the consumption of humans, nor the phenomenon in humans called "consumption", nor does it cover all consumption by humans, or even all food consumption.
> Y'all some hungry mofos.
Less than one animal per person per day, and the overwhelming majority of them are fish and invertebrate sea life (two thirds of that in the Asia-Pacific region).
If we weren't supposed to eat all this stuff then why did Jesus feed those hungry people in Matthew (14:14-21) bread (vegan food) and fish (non-vegan food)? Was he just covering all his bases or was it because fish really aren't meat?
And if fish aren't meat then that website needs to account for that since the numbers would definitely seem to be greatly exaggerated on top of probably being invented.
(Submitted title was "HumanConsumption.Live – Real-Time Global Animal Consumption Stats". I've replaced it with a phrase from the subtitle.)
If anyone's feelings were hurt by anything I posted here today I remind you to think of the plants. Mine have spent more than a week nearly frozen under a thick blanket of sleet waiting for me to have the opportunity to remove their cold weather protections so that they can once again feel the warmth of Mr Sunshine for a few hours before being covered again to protect them from the hard freeze we'll have again tonight. I love my plants and they grow well for me. And then I eat them, all the edible parts anyway, sometimes with meat but not always.
What privileges us vs a crow, catfish or lion?
Animals go out and kill other animals for food, have to deal with the family and friends of the animal it just killed, compete with other animals for the meat, etc. Much more vulnerable and involved.
Everything has to eat something. Humans are omnivorous. We have a choice and some choose to base their diets on plant consumption while others eat a little meat and still others eat mostly meat. It's all okay. The universe is working as intended. Villifying those who choose a different diet than yours seems like a petty exercise by people who need to invent a reason to feel better about themselves.
If you enjoy and love the foods that you eat then you are doing it right. There is no requirement and no need to proselytize about your choices. We have enough other religions who have forgotten the main message to deal with. It will be just as easy for people to tune yours out.
Cannibalism, eating your young, rape, etc.
I’m not sure why killing for food is the one place we should choose to define our values and ethics based on what animals in the wild do.
Even if you could, you would also need to explain all of the evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now). If you had the answer, and it was clear a diet consisting of vegetables causes reduction in physical size, then I have to ask:
Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
As someone who eats meat, that's probably one of the worse arguments against vegetarianism/veganism I've heard. If eating animals is immoral, sure why not? If pillaging your neighbors makes your society better off, do you think a good objection to "maybe we shouldn't pillage our neighbors" is "Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are"?
Do you also have a problem with red meat?
> you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Almost every decision in life must be made without proof, but with evidence and judgment. We know a lot about nutrition, and a lot of evidence points toward health benefits in eating more vegetables and less meat. We can also see lots of vegetarians in our communities and they don't seem sickly or shorter, etc. - we also see elite athletes in public who are vegetarians.
> a diet consisting of vegetables
Vegetarianim is much more than vegetables; it's everything but meat - legumes (generally beans), vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts - plus eggs and cheese. Vegans cut out the latter two items.
> What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now).
Where?
> evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What problems? How does diet affect evolution? We'll lose our hunting muscles over the next 500,000 years? Remember humans haven't changed much biologically in 200,000+ years.
What about raising cows or chickens, then consuming their milk and eggs?
Sheep get castrated, ears notched and tail docked. Then they get set out to pasture.
A bull is selected to be your herd bull and any cows either get milked as you described or pastured to be mama cows for building a herd. Any bull calves either get sold off to be someone else's herd bulls if the genetics are good enough or they get castrated, notched ears and in at least one herd I have seen, their tails are docked.
As the old ag teacher in high school explained, you castrate them to keep their minds off of the ass and put 'em on the grass.
What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?
I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.
And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
Don't get me wrong, I eat meat, but I also understand that the grand majority of fellow meat-eaters have never hunted or reared livestock. Instead they are complete soyboys (ironic isn't it) who merely consume the output from the machine. These same beta cucks will open their mouths to screech "but animals eat animals in the wild!" Completely missing how unnatural an industrialized slaughter machine is.
The only reason they are enslaved is that they lack organization and understanding. Had they those two, they could kill us all.
The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.
As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.
People are ill equipped to put such large numbers in context, let alone ~40 of them.
Like a slide deck, better to limit to one number and one message per page(/screen). Otherwise, it's just a data dump.
I did not expect Asia to be quite so dominant. I did expect, but interesting to see confirmation, that the Americas grow so much grain for animal feed.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Edit: replaced scattered numbers with a proper source.
(Hint: about 5-10x the available fertile land on earth)
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
> More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
> Despite the vast land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories and 38% of its protein.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
> Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
> Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
It gets talked about all the time.
The primary work by US environmentalists (or at least the popular ones) is in ensuring rich people’s homes abut publicly-maintained parks.
If you choose to eat meat, please be aware of the conditions most of these animals exist in and how they die. I'll spare you more numbers, because they don't do the cruel reality justice anyway. Instead, I'll leave you with some video material: https://animalequality.org/blog/factory-farming-facts/
The issue here is the industrialisation of the land and the shortcuts that farmers are doing that essentially kill the land, animals and plants in a way that is unmaintainable
The way this should work is animals should be herded on to land to eat and poo, once the grasses are nearly eaten the animals should be rotated on to other fields, the new grass regrows in this fresh environment because it has no competitor and plenty of fertiliser this process kills weeds and rejuvenates soil ready for planting
This mimics the nomadic lives that early humans would have led, following their herds of animals to fresh new pastures
Then the farmers worked out they didn't need animals to do this process they could just plow their fields and then that gets rid of the weeds, not quite as good as animals doing it in terms of soil health but effective and quick
Then the farmers were sold weed killers which meant they didn't need to plow their field, they just needed to buy GMO glyphosate resistant seeds and flood their fields with glyphosate, some types of crops are even killed close to harvest with glyphosate so it'll be in your food at high rates for certain crops
The problem with this approach is glyphosate is assumed safe because its mechanism for killing weeds is based on a system we don't directly have as humans, but our gut bacteria do, it also competes with glycine in our bodies used to create proteins, I wouldn't want to drink glyphosate from the bottle but it's being added to my food so effectively I do that
It also degrades the soil quality into dust, instead of being full of earth worms which would normally feed the birds, the local wildlife etc
So these mono culture fields are just turning huge swathe of land into sterile dust bowls that exacerbate climate change
Then these crops are either sold directly to me as a plant eater or given to the animals to make them bulk up and sick
As someone who eats a lot of meat I want my animals to be grass fed (or their natural diet) I don't want them to have to take antibiotics because the farmer needed to bulk them up with cheap glyphosate laced mono culture grains and cereals to get more profit out of the animal
So if you are vegan you cannot just wipe your hands of this problem because you're still contributing by eating these mono crops - What we really need from consumers is for them to care how their plants and animals are raised and not accept glyphosate or other weed killers in their supply chains
Animals should be pasture raised from a moral point of view but also a health and climate point of view
Pasture raised animals are the most damaging way to raise animals for food when it comes to the environment. You've got it backwards here.