beardmcdoug wrote:that's fine, I understand what you're saying, but it's a general rule and it stands
The problem is, it really doesn't stand. If there's a benefit, it's barely noticeable
real bucs fan wrote:on a per calorie basis vs lettuce. Use your brains. These are how dumb sites manipulate science.
No, this is how science works. Many of the things we say are "common sense" actually don't hold up to scrutiny. (And there is nothing inappropriate about comparing lettuce to bacon, unless you want to pretend people don't eat salads as a food source.)
The problem with the Vegan = more efficient argument is that it oversimplifies to the point of uselessness.
Some of the glaring problems with the oversimplification:
Not all land is equally usable for different crops. It's not like we are trading 1 acre of avocados for one acre of meat.
It doesn't account for fertilizer which is used more for food vegetables than in overall meat 'production'.
We aren't trading "grain into humans for food" for "grain into cows for food". Much of what cattle eat isn't edible for humans and the land they graze on isn't suitable for growing food crops.
Processing and distrubition is much less efficient for fruits and vegetables. To use the meat/broccoli stats above, if I am shipping calories from production (say Texas) to consumption (say New York) the equivalent to shipping 10 tons of beef is shipping almost 70 tons of Broccoli. And it's not just more weight, but more volume and more packaging.
There is also no accounting for the "renewable" dairy products like eggs and milk.
There is much more, but I should know better than argue with a vegan. It's a cult, not a scientific rationale.