Witness the INSANE land use of US meat/dairy

🐮 The diagram below shows that the biggest land use is for cow pastures/range (35%) - but also more cropland is used to produce animal feed than to produce food direct for human consumption. This diagram doesn't even show the land use impact of US food imports, which covers an even wider area. 🐖🐤

🇺🇸 Americans consume around 3 times the global average meat per person - and if the whole world adopted the average US diet, this would mean global agricultural land use would have to nearly triple. This is absolutely impossible within environmental limits. To put this in perspective, currently, about 50% of global land is currently used for agriculture - so this would require about 140% of the world's land, requiring a total destruction of global ecosystems, and a spare half a planet left over. Source: https://lnkd.in/ePAQG9cm

🌎 Rich countries like the US are eating up a vastly unfair share of the world's resources through unsustainable overconsumption of meat/dairy - a form of 'dietary colonialism'. The only solution to avoid climate crisis is to rapidly cut rich country meat/dairy consumption and converge towards lower meat diets globally.

To be clear: Nobody is saying we should grow crops on former pastureland. Using the vast cropland currently used to grow animal feed (i.e. cereals etc which are fed to cattle, pigs and chickens) to instead grow food directly for human consumption could easily feed the US population. And pastureland in many cases was formerly woodlands, wetlands or wild grasslands which if allowed to regrow could sequester vast amounts of carbon and help restore biodiversity. So by reducing meat consumption to more sustainable levels we can reduce emissions like methane from livestock, free up land for nature to recover, and graze smaller more sustainable herds of cattle on remaining pastureland.

Source of diagram: https://lnkd.in/eDZhpiEe

Martin Bowman's post

food #meat #plantbased #lessandbettermeat #climatechange #climatecrisis #biglivestock