• Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    None of what I said was misinformation. Turning everyone vegan doesn’t resolve factory farming crops. Chemicals to ensure we can actually grow food, monocultures that are terrible for the environment, limitations of where things can grow.

    I’m all for reducing meat consumption, but the utopian world where everyone is vegan has many hurdles to overcome that aren’t just magically resolved. Sure, right now we might be able to reduce land usage for farming, but that is one small aspect of commercial farming under capitalism.

    How do people afford food when they don’t live in a place that can grow it? How do we ensure we can continue to grow food when we are so dependent on chemicals to do so? How does a developing country support agriculture without the huge subsidies currently required in developed nations? How do you educate 8 billion people on how to properly get the nutrients they need from new sources of food? How do convince society that GMOs aren’t bad?

    These are rhetorical, but moving to veganism requires us to think about these types of things before claiming “but less farm land”

    • Rekorse@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      They didnt say everyone needed to be vegan, just that being vegan become the norm. There will always be edge cases, and people can do whatever they want in the wild of course.

      We can push forward and try to figure out how to slaughter even more despite all the problems that are coming with increased line speeds, or we can choose a different direction and tackle those problems.

      Noone said the solution was perfect, just better. Are you afraid of improving yourself?

    • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      How do people afford food when they don’t live in a place that can grow it? How do we ensure we can continue to grow food when we are so dependent on chemicals to do so? How does a developing country support agriculture without the huge subsidies currently required in developed nations? How do you educate 8 billion people on how to properly get the nutrients they need from new sources of food? How do convince society that GMOs aren’t bad?

      Almost all of those are just straight up the same problems that already exist in the current system though?

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Except people who can eat animals can live off fishing and hunting, in places where they can’t grow food.

        Also, I think he was making some point about food staying cheap enough so people can buy it even if they don’t produce it, but I’m not sure what factor is being expected to make food more expensive.

      • Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        And do you have plans to resolve them? I didn’t just make that all up to make veganism sound bad. They are realities that need to be dealt with if we made the ethical decision to not consume animal products anymore. With 80% of the grocery store, currently, relying on animal products, how do we replace them? With agriculture. Those problems now only don’t go away, they get exacerbated. Not to mention all of the pollinator populations dwindling.

        I don’t have the solutions, I’m just some fucking guy. But if we don’t want more and more people suffering while reducing or removing animal products from our diets, we would have to take many steps before doing so.

        And the person who posted this meme is called “MilitantVegan” and straight up doesn’t seem to understand human evolution or science. I’ve only said things that are true, or what my opinion is based on that truth. It might not be great, it might not be true in 50 years, but just watch a documentary on modern agriculture and you will see that these things are our reality. We farm the soil until it becomes barren, and fix it with pesticides and fertilizers for the sake of commercialization. We can’t keep cutting down natural habitats in the search of usable soil to replace those things without completely ruining the lives of animals…the goal of reducing or eliminating the use of animal products.

        • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 months ago

          They are realities that need to be dealt with if we made the ethical decision to not consume animal products anymore.

          Ftfy

          It’s kind of just whataboutism. I don’t really have a horse in this race, but I find it somewhat unlikely that most reasonable people are suggesting every human immediately stop eating animal products forever. A transition to a world where people eat less of them doesn’t need us to figure out how to feed the people of Longyearbyen right now.

      • Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I’m not sure if you just aren’t aware or are being intentionally obtuse, but that isn’t what keeps the soil healthy or enables plants to grow. Have you grown plants ever?

        Sure, photosynthesis takes in CO2 and sunlight and converts that into sugars, but plants need much more than that from the soil and water, which we have to add using modern agriculture.

        Growing food on the scale to feed our population now requires crop rotations, fallow fields, nitrogen, phosphates, potash, insecticides, and billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. You can grow a field of crops once or twice before adding all of the fertilizers and pesticides, but any amount of regular farming requires much much much more than CO2.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          I’m familiar with agriculture, having gone to school, read books, and grown plants.

          It seems that you are the one being intentionally obtuse. You and I both know that carbon dioxide is kept elevated in greenhouses on purpose because doing so increases the yield of plants grown in those greenhouses.

          Yes, other chemicals are necessary to build a plant. The most abundant one however is carbon dioxide. It’s where like 99% of the plant’s mass comes from. And the levels of carbon dioxide in the air change the rate of plant growth.

          Nitrogen is also a big limiting factor, but fortunately we’ve found out how to extract nitrogen from the air efficiently using methane, so we can have enough nitrogen fertilizer to feed everyone.