Photo of Newborn Calf Drinking Milk From a Hose Will Make You Rethink Dairy (*Warning graphic photo)

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24. You make a lot of good points, but also made one error, IMO.

There is no argument that growing plants directly for people food instead of feeding animals first is by far the most efficient, if not the best route nutritionally. And I think that as the world's population continues to grow and climate change becomes worse, we will have to rely more on plants and less on animals for food, which is not a bad thing.

But, as people move to a higher plant based diet, their own production of methane that comes out of them goes up in proportion to the plant content of their diet. Things can be done to reduce the gas and some work partially. But if we switch from 39 million cows farting to 7 plus billion people farting regularly, your argument that we will dramatically reduce green house gases is at best specious. I could argue that we may in fact greatly increase them.

Like everything there is likely an optimum medium where a person consumes a low amount of animal based products but subsist mostly on plants. That would have the effect of dramatically reducing the number of animals farmed for food and the need for factory animal farms. But, if we go to a more plant based diet, we have to fight against abuses like deforestation to produce more cropland as is happening in the Amazon rain forest.