Important to note: “grass-fed” doesn’t actually mean grass-fed, they use plenty of supplemental grain almost everywhere. Trying to scale a pure grass-fed system up works rather poorly and even increases methane emissions
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
Cropland use goes down on plant-based diets, so we don’t need all land to be usable for crops
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
They stopped being “their” gains when they ceased to live, and became “your” gains when you ate them.
The same statement is true for plants, too.
(Saying this as someone who eats very little meat for animal rights reasons, and merely wishes to be padantic right now for some reason)
That’s why I mostly eat the muscles of plants
That seems just like a strange interpenetration to me, like the point is that is should be theirs?
For the plants part, it’s worth mentioning that it takes more plants for animal products than it does to eat them directly
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
But the “gains” weren’t really “theirs” either, since they previously belonged to an organism lower in the food chain. It’s the circle of life.
I’m not arguing for or against eating anything, I’m saying that no matter what you eat, you’re “getting their gains.”
But that is not entirley true since humans don’t eat grass. And not all land is good for crops.
Important to note: “grass-fed” doesn’t actually mean grass-fed, they use plenty of supplemental grain almost everywhere. Trying to scale a pure grass-fed system up works rather poorly and even increases methane emissions
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Cropland use goes down on plant-based diets, so we don’t need all land to be usable for crops
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115