You forget that the food required to make even small quantities of meat is much higher than just growing plants for human. Better to directly eat the energy produced by autotrophs. Deforestation doesn't happen in "poor countries" just so people can survive, it happens because corporations lobby the government of corrupt countries like Brazil so they can destroy habitats for feed and pastures.

Meat production is a simple maths problem to see that wasted energy used by livestock (to survive and grow) is lost energy.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Let me know how it works out for you eating grass, brush and stalks and roots of plants, that's what livestock mainly eat.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

86% of the global livestock feed intake in dry matter consists of feed materials that are not currently edible for humans

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 3 points 8 months ago

All you did was step around the problem. I am not arguing that what is fed to livestock should be fed to humans, I am saying that livestock take up useful space, pollute the air with methane (which is near to 100x a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), that the lands are cleared of their native plants to feed the ever growing meat industry, and on a large scale animal feed has to come from somewhere (which is why I bring up the inefficiency of not sourcing the energy from autotrophs). Animal feed may be inedible, but it is also grown specifically to be feed. I am not suggesting the complete veganizing of the whole planet, just the meat on a large scale is killing the planet.