Browsing social media, it’s apparent that people are quick to point out problems in the world, but what I see less often are suggestions for how to solve them. At best, I see vague ideas that might solve one issue but introduce new ones, which are rarely addressed.
Simply stopping the bad behaviour rarely is a solution in itself. The world is not that simple. Take something like drug addiction. Telling someone to just stop taking drugs is not a solution.
At the same time, I’m also vocal about fixing farming. We need to stop destroying nature to grow food. Fortunately the divestment from animal farming will already significantly improve this because it’s more efficient to eat soy directly than to grow soy, feed it to pigs, and then eat the pig. However we need to fix monocultures by moving to regenerative farming and agroforestry.
The soy that’s fed to pigs is almost entirely the byproduct of pressing soy for soybean oil. about 85% of the soybean crop is pressed for oil. if we didn’t feed the byproduct to livestock, it would just be industrial waste.
I’d challenge that. The whole bean is edible by humans. Tofu is literally just the protein of soy beans without the oil and the startch. I’m sure, if we wanted to, we could just make tofu or TVP out of soy meal.
I also just dislike this “it’s a byproduct” argument. It’s like how whey powder is a “byproduct” of of cheese making. It’s not a good argument. We could also do with less soy oil in the world anyway.
but we DO make tofu and tvp. and they have higher profits per pound than animal feed. but we produce far too much soybean oil for the amount of byproduct people want to consume. giving it to livestock makes sense
It makes sense because we don’t eat enough of the soy and TVP. And we also stuff soy oil is tons of shit. I’m not saying it’s an easy problem to solve, but it all comes down to our over-consumption and refusal to do anything even mildly inconvenient. Eat more whole foods and less meat and a lot of that solves itself.