Who is people? I've been a vegetarian for half a decade now on account of a family history of cardiovascular disease. People lack discipline and imagination, but it's not exactly rocket science to have a plant based diet. The largest obstacle is the large swathes of food deserts and the subsidizing of junk food.
If people had to pay the real price of meat with environmental externalities factored in most people would consume at a level you've described or even less. My issue with that is it doesn't address how most lifestyle emissions are attributable to the wealthiest economic class. It's still a better alternative to the system we have now, which is clearly unsustainable.
A 1/3rd pound burger takes 660 gallons of water to produce, or about 2500 liters. That's not even getting into any of the typical inputs like antibiotics which have their own collection of problems. Say what you will about vegans, it's impossible to talk about the environment without bringing up the impacts of industrial agribusiness and factory farming.
While we're talking about efficiency, you gain an order of magnitude improvement by farming crops for humans to eat rather than farming crops for animals to eat for humans to eat. Only about 55% of the crops we go are directly consumed by humans, the rest is used for feed and biofuels. It would take a tenth of the land area to feed the same amount of people plant-based vs an omnivorous diet. We should absolutely be pushing for less centralized food production, and chickens are a useful part of that. They turn food waste into new food and deal with several pests. That's very different from slaughtering them wholesale for cheap dinosaur nuggets.
If people had to pay the real price of meat with environmental externalities factored in most people would consume at a level you've described or even less. My issue with that is it doesn't address how most lifestyle emissions are attributable to the wealthiest economic class. It's still a better alternative to the system we have now, which is clearly unsustainable.
A 1/3rd pound burger takes 660 gallons of water to produce, or about 2500 liters. That's not even getting into any of the typical inputs like antibiotics which have their own collection of problems. Say what you will about vegans, it's impossible to talk about the environment without bringing up the impacts of industrial agribusiness and factory farming.
While we're talking about efficiency, you gain an order of magnitude improvement by farming crops for humans to eat rather than farming crops for animals to eat for humans to eat. Only about 55% of the crops we go are directly consumed by humans, the rest is used for feed and biofuels. It would take a tenth of the land area to feed the same amount of people plant-based vs an omnivorous diet. We should absolutely be pushing for less centralized food production, and chickens are a useful part of that. They turn food waste into new food and deal with several pests. That's very different from slaughtering them wholesale for cheap dinosaur nuggets.