Let's play "spot the fallacy"

[Autolykos]

@Bert

Meat is not a neccassary source of protein as you can get protein from many sources, and a lot of people (especially in this country) intake more protein than they need daily because they eat meat.

I did say that, in the real world, protein comes from a variety of sources, didn’t I? That is, it doesn’t have to come from meat at all.

Do you happen to know what happens to excess protein that’s taken in? I ask because I’m not sure myself.

@Bert

In terms of production, the grain fed to cattle could be fed to people and could help more starving people than it would take if you bred cattle for food. The overall energy used to produce a pound of beef is higher than that of grain.

Here, here, and here.

Cattle are hardly the only food animals around. There are also pigs, sheep, chicken, turkey, many different species of fish and crustaceans, etc. - and that’s hardly exhaustive.

@Bert

The fallacy in this is that humans need to eat meat to be healthy, the meat itself is the want, not the need. Outside of the OP, if people did not eat meat you could feed the world with the grain and water that would have been fed to cattle for meat.

Strictly speaking, you’re right - humans don’t need meat per se to be healthy. What humans need to be healthy are certain amounts of certain macro- and micronutrients. Many of those happen to exist in many different kinds of meat.

Here’s some additional information on how much grains cattle typically consume. According to this, it’s recommended to feed a cow no more than 1-3% of its body weight in grains per day. Making a conservative assumption that all cows on Earth are fully grown (roughly 455 kilograms), then no more than 14 kilograms of grains should be fed to it per day. Multiplying that times 365 days per year and by the total number of cows in my thought experiment (two billion), we arrive at a figure of 1.022 *10^16 grams of grain each year being fed to all cattle. This is well under the total amount of corn and wheat produced by the world in 2009 - according to the Oklahoma State University link I provided earlier, that figure is about 1.5 * 10^18 grams. There’s a roughly two-order-of-magnitude (or 100-to-1) difference between this figure and what two billion fully-grown cows would need for a year. In other words, the grain needed to feed those cows would constitute only 1% of the total corn and wheat grown by the entire world. So it seems like the issue of grazing land would be more important here.

[nirgrahamUK]

The US government should cut spending on defence.
Yet it should not increase foreign aid.

Give private charity a chance.

Do you have any idea what global annual spend by private charity is even under present conditions?

[Aristippus]

@LogisticEarth

We’re not talking about everyone becoming vastly wealthier overall (which is what happened in the West), but merely having enough to survive.

[tunk]

@claudius

If cutting the budget of the dod by 11 percent saves 80 billion dollars, that’s an empirical fact.

Except that wasn’t the only claim being made. According to the paragraph, “the US alone could accomplish” the feat of moving all the food to the people who need it every year simply by cutting the defense budget. Solving world hunger is as simple as that!