“I don’t believe we should clear all animal protein from our diets – partly because I’ve tried and it makes me feel exhausted, both mentally and physically – but mostly because that’s not how our ancestors or closest primate relatives approached food. They tended to eat meat when they could. Not a lot of it, and certainly not as much of it as we do, but they did eat some.”

“Cows and pigs are the SUVs, insects are the bicycles.”

“By concentrating huge amounts of energy into a tiny package, animal protein provides due fir surprisingly calorie-intensive activities like language, critical thinking, and a rich emotional life.”

“Since most bugs don’t require deboning, there are also big savings in energy and water on the processing env, and because they require far less space to raise and can thus be framed in an urban area, the fossil fuel required to transport them is minimal.”
– Daniela Martins author of “Edible”

 

I commonly come across the topic of eating animals as a lifestyle & diet choice on social media. There is a handful of people that are convinced the world would be a better place if every single person, including the impoverished countries, followed a vegan lifestyle. I agree that veganism is a great choice that deserve to be widespread. However, what would the world really look like if everyone were actually vegan?
Well, as a student of agriculture, it wouldn’t appear very pretty. Assuming this vegan ideal world is taking place during our current times, that would mean the majority of plants are being grown with synthetic fertilizers (under Monsanto and other GE/Biotech companies patents) and dispersing into water ecosystems, killing off wildlife. That may not be the case for areas that receive little to no rainfall, but it would also mean farmers are at the absolute mercy of these companies, not their own animals that they raise and constitute their livelihoods. This disempowers the farmer, empowers the large companies producing these products that require farmer dependency, and leaves our environment in a pretty shitty position. Unless you can convince me these fertilizers are still better for soil than manure (the method humans have been using since agriculture was first cultivated by humans), I do not think this makes it possible to produce the amount of plants we would need to feed so many people in this growing global population.

Secondly, animals need to be raised for something when you extrapolate this ideal into lesser developed countries. I did fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa and witnessed alternative methods to solve their food insecurity problems. Even hydroponics require its nutrients from the nutrient solution to be extracted from topsoils. The energy involved to produce plants and other compost materials to restore fertility into the soil would be degraded over time, because plants on top of soil for growing more plants does work, but takes much longer than manure. Human feces, or biosolids, are also usable in agriculture, as they are already in many parts of Asia. However, for the developed world, this means many people who are dependent on pharmaceutical drugs will also be included in the biosolids pool of feces, returning those pharmaceuticals into the soil to then be ingested by the consumers of the plant crops. There are always negatives to facets within agriculture, and so far, animal agriculture incorporated in a responsible and conscious way, have been proved to be the best strategies for uncontaminated land and consistent, good yields for food products.

This can even be achieved with insects, if farming them commercially becomes popular in the Western World again. The fertilizer of soldier fly larvae, crickets, and other insects are just as valuable for soil fertility as chicken manure. The scale is what would be important to measure- just how many insects need to be produced each year to ensure we have an adequate amount of fertilizer for the number of crops needed to feed the world?