Any vegetarians? Should I become one?

[The Grand Nudger]

I still don't get the soy thing. So we need fertilizer. Sure, we're 7 billion ppl. Don't we need way more of all of that if we first grow the feed and feed it to the cows (instead to ourselves) and then eat the cows? Plus giving us greenhouse emissions from the cows. Using dung as fertilizer is not exactly free of consequences either.

Not -just- fertilizer.....but that's a big issue, yeah. We need a whole hell of alot of things that livestock provides. That industry already supports the commercial vegetable production industry in the first place (and vv).

We don't have to grow the feed, that's the beauty of cattle (and, essentially, all livestock). They're capable of turning something that is not available to us as a food source - on lands too marginal to grow "people food" - into a food source (themselves) while producing -as a byproduct- the inputs required to grow "people food" in a stable form that can be transported to those productive lands - all while reducing our reliance on more harmful and more destructive input sources. We grow the feed on marginal lands using varieties that aren't really suitable for us - using practices that we don't allow in the production of food for human consumption (but which are far less expensive and resource intensive). Our current livestock production model is a byproduct of our agricultural system. It's what we do with the waste (judged from the POV of human consumption). Corn, particularly, has been the crown jewel of human agricultural achievement - but we didn't get from teosinte to ss f1 in one go, we use the "also ran" varieties to make better use of land.

You're right though-nothing is free of consequence, as I said at the start, no free lunch, especially when it comes to lunch. Thing is, I'm not offering a free lunch, not on environmental or ethical issues. I'm content to do the best we can with what we have.