• skizzles@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Thank you for the explanation and not making me feel like an idiot lol.

    I know nothing about farming other than my own little ventures growing chili peppers and tomatoes and stuff. So to a layman’s mind, thinking about the limited land that are afforded to many animals that are used for food, it feels pretty reasonable to assume the situation would be different.

    Thank you again for taking the time to give me the explanation that you did.

    • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
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      3 months ago

      No worries, good faith questions are always welcome. We have to learn somewhere. I think https://ourworldindata.org/ has a bunch of nice graphics about land use, emissions, and efficiency if you want to browse around.

      I was going to become a farmer back in highschool lol, worked on the school farm etc. A lot of stuff is hidden from people by benign images of smiling cows and so on. Animal ag is, in general, staggeringly inefficient. Most of the abject horror comes not because farmers are evil, but because it is the only way to make an affordable product (and it’s heavily subsidised!).

      If you look at percentage of calories from plants across the world you see that exploited countries with low income levels generally eat a shitload more plants, and less industrialised people often reserve meat for feasts and so on (some exceptions, e.g. the Inuit but that’s very uncommon). Until recently regular consumption of animal products was the domain of royalty.