These transformations are tied to the changing American diet. Since the early 1980s, America’s per-person cheese consumption has doubled, largely in the form of mozzarella-covered pizza pies. And last year, for the first time, the average American ate 100 pounds of chicken, twice the amount 40 years ago.
Plants. Also making fewer people might help?
Aren’t plants even worse?
No: chicken eats about 2 calories for each calorie of bird you get. With beef, the cow eats 10x. Cheese is similar.
Why would you possibly think that? When you eat the thing that eats the thing instead of just eating the first thing, obviously its less efficient. In this case, its around 90% less wasted energy to just eat plants than to eat the thing that ate the plants
No because you have to feed every calorie to an animal to get animal proteins. So maybe you’re grazing animals on land that can’t produce human edible plants, but most of the grain and soy grown in America is grown as feed. We could be using the corn fields of the Midwest to grow human food
almost all of the soy grown everywhere (including america) is pressed for oil. the byproduct of that process is called “soymeal” or “soycake” and that is the vast majority of the soy fed to animals. they are eating parts of the plant that people don’t want to.
It takes 10x as much energy to move one chain up the food chain iirc so it takes 10 calories of plants for one calorie of animal protein. So in the long run feeding us plants would be better