Nuclear medicine? Are you talking about meat grown in fermentation chambers?

Yeah. The topic is efficiency. I was covering all the bases.

Do you think that’s the only alternative to animal flesh?

No. There are no alternatives to animal flesh.

Those things don’t even exist on a mass production scale yet and plenty of people avoid animal products somehow

And I know people who commute grandfathered trucks that get single-digit miles per gallon. I didn't say it was strictly impossible, just inefficient.

You’re also conveniently leaving out additional land, water, and energy use as inputs, as well as negative outputs (though tbf I only mentioned inputs).

No I'm not. Go check out all my past debates or cited references on this topic because I'm not rehashing that shit again on a work day.

It’s also a myth that we feed animals only things that are inedible to us, edible soy and grain is very pervasive in animal agriculture

I didn't actually argue that here. The strict statistic is 86% of cattle feed is human inedible (and much of what's human edible is provided at the end to "fatten the cow up" so we get the maximum number of people fed by that one cow having to die). A large percent of chicken and turkey feed is technically human edible (it's low-grade millet) but not particularly nutritious.

I’m also curious about your 90-10 ratio, I’d be incredibly surprised if in reality 90% of net energy in animal feed came from inedible crop, especially when you include pasture feeding and silage in the mix

Do me a favor and reread my comment when you calm down. That's not what I said. I said that 90% of crops like corn are human inedible. And that they go to feed. Not that 90% of what animals eat is crops like corn. You're absolutely right that much of it absolutely comes from cover crops in pasture and silage. Thanks for defending my side.

I thought experts agreed that we could free up a significant amount of land by removing animals from our food system while still feeding the same amount of people

No. Some experts say that. Experts agree that we could free up significant amounts of land by reducing meat intake, but every expert I've read does not think it's some linear thing where zero meat is the ideal. The largest part and problem is the symbiotic relationship between agriculture and horticulture. 67% of TOTAL agricultural land use is in what's called "marginal land", land that cannot be used to grow crops or forested. It can ONLY be used for livestock or nothing.

The problem only starts when livestock need more land than the marginal land that's being used. Until that point, from a land point of view, livestock like cattle are overall increasing the efficiency of the land by producing food where it couldn't be produced otherwise, largely consuming calories that could not be used otherwise.

this wouldn’t be true if animals made our existing croplands more efficient or were at the very least neutral.

That's because it's not true. A lot of local farmers only survive because they have livestock. Let me ask you a question . Why would a farmer have a milk cow if the milk sold for less than the cost to feed the cow? Because that's the situation right now in my local farms, and nobody's selling their cows.

And in case you don't know the answer, because they're saving cow manure instead of buying chemical fertilizers. And they're saving some money on feed by using their crop waste. Ultimately, they're able to reduce their cost so the milk price is a breakeven, and then the fertilizer is a slight profit. If they got rid of that cow (ok, cows plural. Often 3 or 4 at the farms I'm thinking of), they would go out of business.^___^

important question

Let me ask you a question. What matters to you? Do you really care about what's good for the environment, or do you just care about people not eating animals? Because if you're arguing about the environment because you ethically oppose the eating of animals, that's a tainted argument even if it has facts smattered in, and you have to admit it to yourself.

It's only worth us having this discussion if you can tell me to my face that the only reason you're arguing for veganism is environmental. That you don't have an ethical problem with eating meat and you're not convinced that meat is unhealthy.