The redneck strike again.

[bennyboy]

Animals have the advantage of condensing some of the more important nutrients from the earth into meat, and meat has the additional advantage of being relatively easy to store and transport without spoiling. The cost of this, as I see it, is a loss of caloric efficiency.

They can turn things we can't eat, into things that we can,and in the process generate the inputs required to grow yet more food.

They CAN, but don't. You know as well as I do how the US cattle industry works.

as a vegetarian, I hope to minimize the impact of my uselessness.

Your vegetarianism doesn't accomplish that. The issues that seem to bother you aren't caused by what we eat, or even how much we eat, but the manner in which we produce what we eat.

I agree and have said so. If cattle were truly free-grazed, on land that was unsuitable for human-edible plant crops, then nobody could make an efficiency claim. There could still be other issues-- methane production and potentially disease issues, but I don't think anyone could argue that cattle kill as many voles and birds as industrial vegetable farming practices do.

The numbers of efficiency with regards to farmers and the general public are less forgiving btw. Less than 1% of us feed the rest of us. This could be the case anywhere, and we could be even more efficient if we chose to be. In fact, you'll never find a number of people in which that ratio would change. If we reduced our population to 10% of current levels, less than 1% of that 10% could feed the lot. You'll always be useless, by your own metrics - as will the same portion of human beings no matter how small the number becomes. If there were 100 of us, 99 would be useless. If there were ten, 9 would be useless (since a fraction of a person can't farm, of course). In fact...the only number that makes sense with this sort of justification is 1. It seems pretty damned absurd to me that we consider this as any sort of option when we always have the option of feeding more people, better food, in greater quantities than are currently available to them - while reducing the footprint of the system, and minimizing or eliminating the suffering of animals involved in that system. Do you want to accomplish those goals -or is the goal, more accurately put- to get rid of people?

There's another option-- reverse the industrial efficiencies and focus on other values-- sustainability, lower impact on ecosystems, etc. Doing this requires smaller (or no) machinery, basically a technological step back. If we have billions of people sitting around doing essentially nothing, why not scrap the 100-meter-wide threshers or whatever (I hope I'm exaggerating but not sure), and get people actually working fields by hand? Hand-picking grain would save all those voles and birds I was talking about, and give people a respect for their food they haven't had in a long time.

We could end all suffering and eliminate any footprint whatsoever if we just burnt this entire rock to cinder with all hands on deck. Hell, it'd probably be easier and cheaper than growing food too. No, no, wait, how about we eliminate 90% of non-human life? Wouldn't that fall within the confines of your justifications just as easily as eliminating the excess human animals might? After all, we're all on equal footing, eh? Or, still just spitballing, we could set up a lottery with every living thing represented as a number - then we could eliminate whatever the ping pong ball tells us too until only 10% of what we began with remains, human, non-human..the whole lot.

Well, either we self-limit, or we continue to grow until there are no real viable solutions. Right now, changes in food production could improve our quality of life and minimize the environmental effects of so many people. But if we get more efficient, and end up supporting 20 billion people, we'll hit a point where only efficiency matters, and quality of life is no longer an option to consider.