this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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[–] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Except that you're eating way more plants if you eat animals than if you just eat plants, as animals eat lots of plants.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 month ago

Depends on the animal. Home raised chicken, for instance, can almost live on human lefts.

Insects also eat things that humans really do not consume, for instance.

[–] vivendi@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They don't really eat the same thing, do they?

[–] Teppichbrand@feddit.org 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

An average broiler chicken diet is composed of 42.8% corn and 26.4% soybeans for protein, and about 14% bakery meal.

Source

Edit: 25 million chicken are getting killed daily in the US.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So what you're saying is that for each animal you eat, you save a lot of plants?

[–] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, for each animal you eat you're eating lots of plants in a really inefficient - and needlessly cruel - way

[–] psud@aussie.zone -1 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I cannot eat grass, ruminant animals can. How is it inefficient for me to eat the animal rather than the grass?

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Because we use the land that could be used to grow enough food to feed many people to grow food for cows, which then feed fewer people. By buying into this system, you’re propagating inefficiency.

[–] psud@aussie.zone -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Right, we bulldoze forests to make fertile land available. I agree that's bad, I don't want celery from that land either

[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago

We’d need less land for crops generally if we were allotting it to human food instead of livestock feed.

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To add to idiomaddict's great points, the animals don't eat exclusively grass. In Australia (assuming based on your instance): "the latest estimate (2017-18) of annual feed use in Australia is 13.58 million tonnes" (SFMCA).

This includes "cereal grains, legume grains, vegetable protein meals, animal protein meals, cereal milling co-products, minerals and vitamins" as per that same source.

I often see people use the deforestation of the Amazon for soy crops as a sort of gotcha for vegans, even though most soybeans are grown for use as animal feed (in the Amazon, mainly cattle). Incidentally, cattle farms are also responsible for much more deforestation in the Amazon than soybeans, but I digress.

I'll also note that grass-fed beef has often been shown to be as bad (or sometimes worse) for the environment than feedlot beef. It also can't scale to meet current meat consumption.

[–] maypull@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

most soybeans are grown for use as animal feed

in fact, most soy beans are grown for oil, and even what is fed to livestock is mostly the byproduct made by pressing beans for oil. but even beyond that, cattle only eat about 7% of the total global soybean crop.

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Cattle sure, but if you include poultry and porc that shoots up to around 80% of soy used for feed.

[–] maypull@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

a soybean is only like 1/5 oil. after we've extracted the oil, feeding the meal or cake as it's variously called to animals is a conservation of resources.

[–] Teppichbrand@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago

Kurzgesagt explained it very well

[–] Vandals_handle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Oats, barley, wheat, rye, rice and bamboo are all grasses humans can eat.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 0 points 1 month ago

That would have been correct in the pre-domestication era.