significantly fewer plants are harvested if you switch to a fully vegan diet.

that has never happened.

I didn’t even touch on all the deforestation

the paper does, and it’s deeply flawed. no one should trust these over simplifications of our vastly complex agricultural systems.

that’s without accounting for the feed

it’s not, and the methodology is flawed.

https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/57aee0d5-0013-4182-abe7-55e1a817f553/content

the movement is growing

google trends says otherwise

it is possible to feed a vegan world, and it would actually be easier

it’s even easier to feed a world with no living creatures. that doesn’t make it desirable

We could grow far more food by repurposing that land.

if that were the case, why aren’t we? it seems there must be a good reason that in the over half decade since this paper’s publication, surely we could have revolutionized our food production. instead, even though veganism saw a steady rise from before the publication of that paper until 2020, it’s been in decline since then. somehow i don’t think that paper captured the whole scope of our agricultural system.

one calorie of meat requires 6 calories of crops.

ah, but much of the crops that are fed to animals are the byproducts of our own agricultural processes. by feeding them to cattle we get more calories than we would, since we won’t eat, for instance, cottonseeds and corn stalks.

99% of male calves are killed immediately after being born

that’s not true.

so long as i can still choose my own actions, i can’t say that other people’s reactions caused me to act in any way.

it’s not an analogy. it’s a hypothetical. and in my hypothetical you can see that your proposed causation falls apart. even in your amended version, when do i lose free will?

so to be clear, sometimes meat is a better choice based on convenience.

you can’t deny that a demand for meat influences the scale of meat production. Everyone in the production and consumption chain has blood on their hands.

“influences” is so weak that i am going to say that you meant “causes”. is this a strawman? maybe. but if you’re argument relies on the ambiguity of “influence” as opposed to the much stronger “cause” then you’re not really saying anything of substance anyway.

so does the decision to eat meat cause meat production in the future? no. a thousand times no. first, and this should be all that needs to be said, farmers and abottoir workers are agents with free will, so their decisions cannot in any meaningful sense be said to be caused by anything except their own will. that should be the beginning and end of it, but consider this additional hypothetical:

if there are three blue pigs in the world, and i kill all three and send them to the butcher shop, when someone buys that pork or bacon or ham, how do we kill more blue pigs? it’s impossible. so we can see that even if people lack free will and there is some economic theory that actually showed some causal link where consumption causes production (which is impossible), then we can see that consumption still can’t actually cause later production in even this one case, but probably many others.

Not sure how cooking pea protein sausage is less convenient than cooking a pork sausage.

if you’re cooking it’s probably roughly the same. but if you’re out and about, whether at a drive through or a neighborhood cookout, the meat might just be more convenient.

no, it’s not. bullets fired from guns kill people, but there is no similar causal system at play that can traverse time and kill animals in the past

You are ending the life of a sentient being that feels pain and has feelings/emotions, that has family of one kind or another, for no benefit other than your own pleasure.

there are reasons to eat meat besides"pleasure". like nutrients or convenience or cost, and it’s unlikely that most meat eaters are killing anything.

Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.

you might mean “all of humanity” or “all meat eaters” caused suffering, but, in fact only the individuals who cause suffering have done so, and eating meat does not, in and of itself, cause any suffering at all. if there is any suffering involved, it happens before the meat-eating, and thus cannot be caused by the meat-eating, since an event in the future cannot cause an event in the past.

You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. “Slaughter” excludes “humane”.

this is just a semantic game. there are human slaughter laws in most of the developed world. maybe all of it. and some in the developing world, too.

everything eats living things. what is fucked up about that?

the sources on that paper are labyrinthine, but i recall pulling up the water use for cattle out of it, and they attributed all of the water used in the production of all the food given to cattle to the production of the cattle, which might make sense if you don’t think about it for even a few seconds more. we know that there are things that we grow that we use, and then discard other parts. maybe crop “seconds”; that is things that we grew thinking we would eat it but we pulled it to early or too late or mashed it up pretty bad during harvest or whatever. we are actually conserving water use by feeding these things to cattle, but it isn’t credited to cattle, it’s counted against their total water use.

that was just the water use for california dairy cattle. if even 10% of the study is done this sloppily, how much do you trust that study?

that image is based on poore-nemecek 2018 which has terrible methodology.