>>I came accross that post and thought it was good arguments to respond to >>the claim that a vegetarian diet need less surface to be produced. >>jean-claude > >Jean-Claude, that post sais nothing against the fact that almost >and vegetarian food production needs significant less surface to be >produced than animal food. for sure not, that is exactly the point ,. Why the fact that agricultural products needs less surface to produce a calorie is IMPORTANT ? . It is not from my point of view ! Or it is only once you desertified natural populations of animals and plants and overpopulate some aeras so much and have no other option left than to survive with the minimum impact . Hunger in the world is not a consequence of not having enough surface , it is not because there is not enough foods available . Again i have seen in India nut trees not harvested because despite the poverty they prefer to eat rice.and get numb themselves on spicy foods. Even if the whole world was vegetarian there will still be hunger and malnutrition ( even more so from a paleo point of view ). That is the fallacy of the vegetarian discourse that feeding peoples require to destroye natural environments . and because of that a vegetarian diet is "less destructive than an omnivorous one It is true only when you think you have to cultivate the ground .or raise animals with unatural diets. >All agricultural "produced" animals at first eat agricultural >produced plants. Not at all , or more exactly it doen't have to! herbivorous domestic animals can live from wild plants. And use up 70-90% of it, which goes to waste. > >Any real paleo meat - various wild game - need still *much* more surface >per human. They don't tell you the real impact on natural vegetations and fauna of a small field of grain . A grass field because of it 's biodiversity is producing more calories than a wheat field ( not necessarely directly for the cow that graze it but globaly for the whole of the food web, so in definitive to every species involved) All my relations ! will say a native from america. what is affecting a spider is affecting me in definivite. As long we don't get that one we will be in competition. with other species and between ourselves . Nature is not a finite cake to be split in parts , It is more like an hologarmme in each morsel you have the whole of the cake. But is is not "produced". It just naturally occurs and leaves >nature as we want > >And of couse sea fish is a kind of wild game that needs zero land surface. Good exemple the depletions of sea life is not because there is not enough water in the oceans ,they are due to unbalanced harvesting .They are due from making big holes in the food webs. It is exactly what is happening on the land , with agriculture we started to make big holes in the food webs , favorising some limited number of species at the expense of most of the rest. Happily nature don't let this happen too easely and made a "weed problem". or a" predator ,parasites , diseases problem." >You quoted: >>>"On a diet of just grains, the carrying capacity of earth is sixty times >>the current population." >Who wants this, to carry as much people on the earth as possible? > >The question is more, given how many as we *are* now on the earth, >how we can survive now? If all the dense populated countries of the east >switched to a eating habit as usual in the western world today >- desaster would arise. Great ! at least we will not continue to think that the problem can be solve with what created it in the first place . we will be face to face with it, the problem is allready there ,postponing the consequences and outcomes of it can only retard the real change and makes more suffering to come . Why do peoples who have the technological means to eat as much as they want, do so ? _ mostly because the quality of foods that this technology allow to produce in quantity is so low that there is no other way to survive that to overeat. There is as much peoples starving here than where foods is scarce .but natural _ And also because eating a lot is leading to malabsorbtion problems and waste the food anyway.. jean-claude >