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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

The externalities of a plant-based diet are enormous, from the use of pesticides which then leads to the decimation of the bird population to the massive amount of fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, to the explosion in the rate of obesity and diabetes -- at least grazing cattle is good for the land and leads to carbon sequestration.

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Most cattle doesn’t graze, and grazing being “good” for the land is contentious.

Most cattle eats soy beans and stuff like that. Incidentally, crops grown for cattle are a big driver of Amazon rainforest destruction.

This is all widely known at this point.

Cattle also emits significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

So overall cattle is far far worse environmentally, having all the bad things your comment cited about an order of magnitude worse than the food your comment cited.

Most cattle you eat is probably are not grazing, and ironically grazed cattle are environmentally speaking the worst for the environment.

https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-climate...

Most plant agriculture is used to feed livestock. Consider how eating higher up the food chain requires about an order of magnitude increase in inputs. If everyone ate plant based diets, the agricultural footprint would go down dramatically.

You have this backwards to the point I thought you were being sarcastic. Cows and pigs require a huge multiplier of agriculture (and water) to feed them in order to produce an equivalent amount of food for humans.

Thanks to subsidies targeting livestock feed, it is cheaper to buy feed shipped from the next state over than it is to grow it yourself. Thus, petroleum based fertilizer, transportation fuel, and dung reservoirs.

Then there’s the whole issue of methane from cow farts being a serious source of greenhouse effects. It would be funny if only it wasn’t.

And, the obesity/diabetes link is also tied to farm subsidies making starchy corn and wheat practically free while leaving actually healthy vegetables to compete against practically free.

The only way out is to ramp farm subsidies down to zero. That would be political suicide because it will increase the price of food. Especially meat. But, the alternative is to continue to slowly eat our way into diabetes and global warming.

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