Vegan faux fish burger (Non-vegan viewpoint)

[Oldgreybeard]

what will grow on land presently down to grazing depends a great deal on the nature of the land. Around here, grazing land tends to be that which isn't suitable for cash crops, so if it wasn't grazed then it would most probably not have a worthwhile purpose. Whether it becomes woodland or not depends very much on the location. An experiment on a large area of land under MoD control not far from here showed that if unmanaged it tended to revert to scrub, rather than woodland, and tree planting wasn't as successful as hoped, down largely to the poor soil quality I believe.

If we want to reduce food imports (which I personally think is a good objective) then we will need to make better use of all the land we have. The population of the UK is far too high to be sustained by the amount of land we farm, so we'd need to find ways to put more land to productive use and couldn't afford to let any potentially productive land revert to scrub or woodland.

It may be that we come up with technological solutions to feed our very high population density, but that seems to be a fair way away, and personally I don't feel comfortable with increasing the level of processing of food. Unless we drastically reduce our population density, then we are stuck with having to import a lot of food, there's no other way around the conundrum, I think.

[AE-NMidlands]

I do understand that there is a debate as to whether cows on existing grass lands are a problem or not. The argument appears to be that the grass, if not eaten, would decompose releasing the methane anyway. So there is no net impact.

But it's not like that. CO₂ gets built into sugars by plants, when they die the tissues or juices or sugars either oxidise directly (back to CO₂) or get eaten by something else which metabolises them and again excretes CO₂ as we do. Fermentation to alcohol is only by a yeast in the absence of oxygen and is quite uncommon. Nothing makes methane unless it is buried in an airless swamp, and even then as I understand it peat is likely to result instead.

[GarethC]

I do understand that there is a debate as to whether cows on existing grass lands are a problem or not. The argument appears to be that the grass, if not eaten, would decompose releasing the methane anyway. So there is no net impact.

But it's not like that. CO₂ gets built into sugars by plants, when they die the tissues or juices or sugars either oxidise directly (back to CO₂) or get eaten by something else which metabolises them and again excretes CO₂ as we do. Fermentation to alcohol is only by a yeast in the absence of oxygen and is quite uncommon. Nothing makes methane unless it is buried in an airless swamp, and even then as I understand it peat is likely to result instead.

Oh I don't actually disagree with you. It's just a less clear cut argument than, for example, the deforestation or resource intensiveness ones (I believe).