#since those aren't vegan stables for other cultures

[ardinwriter]

A particularly annoyingly evangelizing vegan colleague of mine got me wondering what exactly the end plan for these people is.

Presumably they want everyone on the planet to go vegan.

Okay, did the math and growing the world's densest (most calories per acre) crop, potatoes, on every acre of the world's arable land you could more than achieve the majority of the nutrition side of things.

You'd still have to deal with the B12 issue (the required human nutrient that potatoes lack), which depending on your level of veganism could be a problem since there are only three sources of B12: meat, dairy, and pills and the contents of the pills is bacterial cultures so that might be a no go, I don't know. Maybe that's fine.

We'll ignore for the moment the distribution issues of getting those spuds to people in non-arable areas.

So say you've completely solved the nutrition problem of being vegan.

How do you plan to open up the arable land currently used for animal production (roughly 75% of currently arable land is currently used for grazing) and what do you plan to do with the existing animals? Being vegan, you can't kill them or harm them in any way, so you can't sterilize them either. So they're just going to keep breeding with no culling other than natural deaths.

In the US alone, we have an estimated 308 million commercial laying hens. Each producing roughly an egg a day. At the moment, with the majority of those eggs going to stores to be consumed as eggs, the US has a fertilization rate of 13%. Even if that didn't climb after egg eating was stopped, that means 40 million fertilized eggs a day. If even 5% of those hatch, that's 2 million chicks after the first 20-21 days of this.

If we aren't eating or killing them, that's a problem.

And since the larger the predator, the longer the gestation time and smaller the number of offspring in a breeding period is a general reality, we are hosed on chickens alone if everyone just stops eating them because there won't be enough predators in the food chain without humans to stem the the chicken tide.

And that's just one livestock animal. It'll be a problem with the others as well.

And all this is ignoring all the other non-food products we get from animals. What are we replacing those with? And don't say plastic (or vegan leather or it's equivalents, cuz those are just plastics), I'd say relying even more heavily on fossil fuels isn't a good strategy here.

So, really, what's the end game here?