#it would be cool to stop deforesting the amazon to raise cattle etc etc

[anonymusbosch]

so, @headspace-hotel and I agree on a lot of outcomes we'd like to see with respect to ecology, responsible agriculture, reforestation, etc, but this post rests on so many factual errors that it's completely backwards. The number one thing is that monoculture is so dominant because of animal agriculture and not vice versa.

In the United States, yes, we have monocrops! As of 2023, there are 94.9 million acres of corn and 83.6 million acres of soybeans in the US; the numbers change slightly year-to-year. And there's a ton of corn in the American diet, yes. But almost all corn production goes to animal feed and to ethanol production:

(graph source)

All of the corn for humans shares the gray bars in the chart with industrial alcohols.

And why has corn production been rising? According to the USDA (same source as graph above),

"Strong domestic demand for livestock feed and fuel ethanol coupled with growing exports has led to higher prices, providing incentives for farmers to increase corn acreage. In many cases, farmers have increased corn planted area by shifting acres away from less-profitable crops."

It's not that we have all this corn laying around and need to feed it to cattle or pigs or chickens to make something useful with it - it's that you can make more money farming feed corn for animal use than by growing another crop for human use, because animal feed is valuable, because people buy meat and eggs and dairy.

And soy? Worldwide, about 77% of soy grown goes to animal feed, mainly for chickens, pigs, and cattle. Only 19% goes to human food (of which 69% is as soybean oil and the rest generally as tofu or soymilk). In the US, 90% of soy grown is grown for animal feed. (Sidenote: Because of trophic effects, it would take about 30x less soy to feed humans directly than it takes to feed cattle to get the equivalent amount of calories.)

Again, it's not that we've got all these soybeans lying around and we feed them to animals because we don't know what else to do with them - soybean production increases to meet the demand for protein-rich animal feed. It's not 100% because of the use of soybeans as feed, since the oil and cake of processed soybeans are sold separately, and getting value out of the oil makes it more attractive to farm soybeans, but -

"In line with the uses of soy globally (Figure 3), the greatest driver underlying the production increase in South America is most likely the pig and poultry industry’s demand for soy cake, although it is given additional impetus by concurrent increases in the demand for soy oil by the food manufacturing and biofuel industries."

And -

"In a direct sense, soy expansion in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay is responsible for only a part of the total loss of native vegetation6 ,43 ,44 ,45 . A common pattern, however, is that land is first cleared for cattle ranching and shortly afterwards sold or rented out at a higher price for more lucrative soy production6 ,43 ,44 ,45 ,46 . Soy expansion, accordingly, may indirectly bring about land use change by ‘pushing’ cattle ranching into frontier areas6 ,47 ,48 ,49 . The arrival of a high-value crop such as soy can also drive up local land prices and thereby incentivise the clearing of surrounding land."

(section 4.1, 4.2 here)

The combined effects of cattle ranching and soy farming to feed cattle make an immense impact on conversion of land in the Amazon to pasture and monoculture fields.

So - WE DO NOT HAVE CATTLE TO EAT CORN. WE HAVE CORN TO FEED CATTLE. Yes, cattle and sheep and goats and chickens are able to eat plant and insect matter than humans can't and that's a good portion of why they were domesticated. But especially in America, industrial animal agriculture does not reflect an abundance of land unsuitable for anything but grazing - it reflects croplands intensively and industrially farmed specifically to feed animals.

There are other parts of this post that I find generally true (the less desirable parts of the animal are cheaper and thus more often eaten by poorer people, which is, like, so true it's almost tautological - except while poorer people may eat more cheap meat, consumption of e.g. dinner sausage is fairly uniform across income levels) and some that are missing major context (migrant laborers - the majority of farmworkers are family members; of hired laborers on farms, 85% are not migrants; the animal agriculture industry is rife with exploitation of undocumented immigrants, underpaid workers, and serious physical injuries at rates three times higher than other industries); and some that don't follow (yes, reducing demand for specific cuts of meat doesn't go 1:1 with reducing meat, but it's not useful to imagine a single animal being divided, here - the model is more like "if nationwide demand for x drops by 3% we should reduce production for next year" or "if revenue from all products from a given animal source drops by 5%, then we should reduce production by 2% because those marginal cases will no longer be profitable." And, like, a lot of the least valuable pieces of meat and meat byproducts do just get wasted because they're not worth the price to handle? Capital's goal is not to maximize usefulness of the whole individual animal but profit overall.)

My general perspective is that for environmental reasons - land use, methane emissions, water use, etc - it would be much better for the ecology of the Americas if we consumed less meat. I do think that it's more useful to frame it as "reducing consumption", because I agree with @headspace-hotel that there's little additional value in not using, say, chicken broth or animal fat or other byproducts. And of course not everyone can cut meat or eggs or dairy out of their diets, for health or allergy or cost reasons. Abstaining completely from animal products isn't a useful goal for most people! Abstaining largely would have a massive impact. But even switching one or two meals a week, for those who are able, from meat to legume-based proteins would have a direct effect on reducing the incentives to grow massive amounts of monoculture crops to use as livestock feed.

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.