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Comment by qbaqbaqba | Hacker News Reader

I have some doubts about becoming vegetarian: soya cultivation has a huge negative impact on rain forests and on farmers. I prefer to obtain meat from local farmers that use traditional methods - don't abuse antibiotics and use locally grown pasture.

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Soya beans aren't the only bean a vegetarian can eat. There are plenty of protein rich plants that will grow in almost every climate.

While I applaud your meat buying preferences, it would be an environmental disaster for every meat eater on earth to attempt to do the same.

While I applaud your meat buying preferences, it would be an environmental disaster for every meat eater on earth to attempt to do the same.

I might not get the point, but why would it be a bigger environmental disaster?

Because we'd need significantly more land/pasture to feed livestock that way.

in a 1:1 substitution case. but locally, sustainably (yeah, maybe not the right word ... organically?) produced meat is more expensive, which should lead people to eat less meat, but if they eat meat to consume meat produced locally with a smaller environmental footprint (if that's the case, I'm not an expert in that field).

maybe that's just wishful thinking though.

Alcohol is ridiculously expensive in Australia. We don't drink less of it.

If the cost of meat were a driving factor in reducing consumption, consider that it's maybe 4x less expensive (a guesstimate based on my own experience) to eat whole plant based proteins than meat.

It is inherently more efficient and sustainable to eat the plant proteins we grow than to feed them to animals. 1kg of meat also requires 100x the amount of water per kg of protein [1].

[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full

A large part of the soy is being fed to livestock.

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