Yoused
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OP link said:… it’s a healthier life choice, proponents maintain, but it’s also a better choice for creating a positive environmental impact on our planet.
other source said:The Beyond Meat burger uses 99 percent less water, 93 percent less land and 90 percent less fossil fuel emissions; the Impossible Burger uses 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and 89 percent less fossil fuel emissions than a quarter pound of regular ground beef.
Sorry, no, those numbers are utter bullshit.
The claim about lower water usage is an out-and-out lie. The crops used to fake meat, especially corn and soy, are major water users. There is no way in hell that those numbers are even close.
The land used to run cattle is scrub desert and rangeland that is simply unsuitable for agriculture, so that argument is absolute nonsense.
Fossil fuels are heavily used across ag, so I would be surprised to find out that the figures could be massaged to yield that much (or even any) difference between meat and faux meat.
Which is in no way suggesting that the meat industry is just fine or that we should drive the alternatives off the face of the earth – there are obviously issues, probably huge ones, with meat production that seriously need to be addressed (antibiotic abuse is one of the biggest). But there are also issues with agriculture in general that need to be addressed (monoculture is very dangerous).
In the end, we cannot have sustainable food production without pairing it with sustainable consumption. And it is not clear that we can have either in a corporate-dominated, minimally-regulated free market environment. There are some things for which laissez faire capitalism is just not a good fit, and food production is a big one.