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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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If it helps, in Argentina they are deforesting large swathes of land and pushing previous owners out at gunpoint just to plant more soy. That's not an Onion article.
It's worth noting 77% of the world's soy goes to animal feed. Only 5% of soy goes to soy bean products like tofu, soy milk, etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
Then, 90% of that feed gets used by the animals to walk around, fart, and generally stay alive until they get slaughtered. Essentially, 70% of the soy crops gets wasted on breeding animals to suffer.
Yes, but what is the soy used for (mostly)?
take a wild guess
feeding animalsPeople who genuinely think plant based diets are cruelty free and environmentally friendly don't know anything about modern agriculture.
It's not perfect, but I think that statement is rather misleading. Problems with plant agriculture are multiplied by animal agriculture which relies on it even more to grow crops for feed. Counterintuitively plant-based diets use fewer crops and less cropland compared to animal agriculture due to not loosing energy from feed crops going to creatures who use that energy on their own body function
You should assume that any consumption, if not proven otherwise, is not cruelty free and environmentally friendly. The most moral thing to do is to consume less, I guess.
Just see the boiling hot greenhouses in the south of Spain. You can see it from space. All jam packed with discount African labour.
And on the environmental side we have clearcutting thousands of acres of forest for farmland, destroying habitats for millions of animals, a continual extermination of many "pest" species for as long as the farm is operational, AND horrifically inefficient irrigation methods that drain the water table of all its juices.
I'll never say that mass agriculture is anywhere near as bad as mass animal husbandry for the environment, but the people we see around the world who act like there's no environmental impact are the ones who irk me.