Most people will hardly notice the difference now if ground beef in meat sauces, taco meat, etc was replaced, or even only half of it, with plant based meat.
Is that really true? Livestock farming can be entirely sustainable using renewable inputs. The per unit resource usage might be high by some simplistic arbitrary metrics, but when those resources are basically sunlight and its natural products, what’s the problem? In any event we’re nowhere near the planet’s renewable carrying capacity.
I’m against foolish, cruel, and unsustainable “factory farming” practices, but the existence of a bad method of doing something doesn’t mean there aren’t good ones.
> People clearly like to eat meat, so if we can replace a lot of it with something plant based that also satisfies those needs, then why not do it?
People clearly like to drink sugar water too. So we replaced sugar with food science experiments like aspartame and sucralose that can’t be metabolized. But now we’re learning they’re endocrine disrupters with significant side effects.
Yes. Livestock farming needs more than “sunlight and it’s natural products.” There isn’t enough land to replace factory farming with better pasture-raised methods [1]. Beef production is the leading causes of deforestation in the world [2], responsible for 80% of deforestation in the Amazon [3].
How is this sustainable?
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/beef-cattle
[3] https://www.fao.org/3/xii/0568-b1.htm#:~:text=Pastures%20cov....
And it’s sustainable because pasture is reusable and so is the farmland that grows corn and other feed.