+Missing Munchies: "What would happen if every person on planet earth became vegan? Where would we find enough plants to feed everyone? How would we produce enough food?"

I think you're question might be better phrased as "What will happen when every person goes vegan?". The short answer is that they'll all live longer, happier lives, and we'll have more food than we know what to do with. =o)

This being a somewhat involved set of questions, there's a somewhat longer answer, +Missing Munchies, but I'll do my best to keep it short(ish). =oD

To start with, we're not in any danger of people stopping eating animals all at once, are we? As we discussed before, agribusiness tightly controls the number of animals produced, and they do so via artificial insemination (google "rape rack" for more info on this). We're not eating them all because we're fighting to keep the population down; rather, the market currently requires these numbers of deaths, and suppliers are meeting that demand. So, while more and more people are living by their values each year and not eating animals, this is a gradual process, and as demand deceases, the production managers are correspondingly decreasing supply.

As for how to feed people, our problem will be food abundance, not shortages. The reason for this is that, depending on whose numbers you want to trust, each pound of edible animal flesh requires between four to thirteen pounds of plants to produce. In essence, we're filtering protein/energy through animals before consuming them, and are doing so at a substantial loss. Putting aside for a moment the health, environmental, and social issues inherent to agribusiness, when we do stop raising animals in order to eat their bodies and instead use that agricultural land to produce human-edible goods, we'll be able to feed the world many times over with food to spare!

+Missing Munchies: "the food we feed animals isn't human food. Cows eat hay or pigs eat stuff like slop. Chickens can be fed rotting vegetables that happen to go bad. That is all the stuff we don't eat."

I don't imagine we're going to try to feed humans what we currently feed cows; that would be so much silliness. Rather, I expect that the land presently used to grow feed grains and grasses will be used instead to grow the plethora of crops that humans enjoy. It honestly didn't occur to me that one might assume otherwise. So... should I take this to mean that you're no longer worried about how we'll feed the world as we all make the transition to veganism? =o)

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This post is one in a series in which excerpts of discussions on veganism from other threads are reposted (or paraphrased) for the sake of expanding the conversation. As always, your thoughts and questions are welcome. See the full collection via the  #spommveganchats  hash (or perhaps with a more robust search, such as goo.gl/JoxZC).

(for anyone requiring/desiring more context, the original conversation can be found at goo.gl/A6RFrx)

#vegan   #food   #worldhunger   #logicalfallacies