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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Meat production requires a magnitude more soy (in raw materials) to produce the same output as e.g. tofu/tempeh/soy milk production.

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A large part of cattle feed soy is based on leftovers from the food industry.

or is the soy oil a way to make more money off of animal feed?

It's the other way around. According to the article, 77% of soy production goes to animal feed.

you're absolutely right - preparing a high quality beef meal takes a lot more than just processing soy, but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it. I could be wrong though.

The issue is not judt the extra procesding cost.

I haven't ran the numbers, but parent hinted at a cow needing to eat, say, 10 Kg of soy per Kg of meat produced, while you could have just eaten the soy directly.

Meat production uses a lot of land to produce food for your food, that's why it's so inneficient. Instead you could just use a tiny fraction of that land, and grow enough food for everyone.

> but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it

You're comparing two cases of "mass production" without any quantifier.

Beef has an over 15 times larger carbon footprint compared to tofu.

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

So sure, if everyone switches we would substitute one mass production for another, but we could feed 15 times as many people (all else equal).

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