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Originally Posted by _bruce_ treating ANY lifeform like this is wrong! the only way to improve the situation is avoiding products made from animals... but that is nearly impossible -> your delicious steak once was an unhappy cow.
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It's funny you should bring steak up as an example.
Vegetarian propaganda, and you can get away with far less bullshit in the vegetarian community than the general population mind you, makes a strong point over cattle consuming more nutrition than they produce.
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Eating meat is not cost effective, planetarily. Period. Lyman cites Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet as a way of noting it. For example, it takes 32 pounds of grain to create a pound of beef. One-half pound of grain is a subsistence daily ration for a human. That means 32 people can live on the grain needed for one pound of beef if they ate the grain instead of the beef.
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That's the tip of the iceberg. If such a waste can be observed only in food intake vs meat produced, imagine how the often fertile cattle fields could be put to use towards agriculture. But they're not; they're occupied. The losses are beyond estimate. Then there's the costs of the facilities involved between birth and distribution, not to mention water intake and other nutritional requirements like minerals. Water especially.
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Authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich note that a pound of wheat can be grown with 60 pounds of water, whereas a pound of meat requires 2,500 to 6,000 pounds.
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A cow must be fed rather well since, according to the industries, they can't grow too fast. Speeding up a cow's weight gain and sale date by keeping them healthy and fat is well worth the extra expense for raising companies. It also stops the spread of disease.
It's ironic I'm posting this on a bodybuilding site. Bodybuilders are a rare demographic that actually needs the dietary emphasis on protein that would be difficult to plan without meat. They're one of the few groups that couldn't live exactly as they are on a vegan diet. Not exactly the target audience for my sources.
However, since bodybuilders can easily live with little or no red meat, the statistics don't lose any importance. I can't say for sure, but I assume the other meats (chicken, forgive me) are far less resource intensive and are more a conversion of low protein to high protein food (the way meat should be) than a terrible waste of resources.
