this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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But if the answer to that is no, then by eating meat you’re responsible for the death of the animal you eat, plus all the insects that were killed to raise crops to feed it before you ate it. For something like a cow, they’re eating significantly more crops than you would because they weigh like 1000 lbs.
If the answer is yes, then don’t eat the cow, because as far as we can tell it has more awareness and capacity for suffering than a bug.
take soy, as an example.
some 80%+ of all soy is pressed for oil, but a soybean is only about 20% oil anyway. that leaves 80% of 80% of the total crop as industrial waste. we feed that to livestock. (we call it soymeal or soycake). so no insects are harmed to produce that for livestock: they were harmed to make soybean oil. by feeding the byproduct to livestock, we are conserving resources.
Sorry, this is an accounting trick. The cows are still eating an agricultural product that killed insects, we can’t decide ‘oh, actually that’s entirely for oil’ if the soy meal is also valuable enough to sell and export as a product (about 65% of production, per the wiki article you linked).
There also aren’t any livestock that live entirely off soybean meal; a huge amount of corn is also fed to livestock. So even if you want to do shoddy accounting, they’re not being raised off waste and sunlight. A lot of crops are grown exclusively for livestock consumption.
even the corn plant is a great example. people don't eat corn leaves, cobs, or stalks, but livestock eat silage made from them.
Some can argue insects are more important to our ecosystem.
Either way, I have personally cut back on eating red meat. Been trying to cut back on meat altogether, but strictly for my health. At this point in the world, I don't have much hope. Climate change will dictate what we eat.
Unless you consume the entire animal yourself and refuse to share, the math doesn't check out.
A cow eats more crops which kill more insects over its lifetime than you will by eating plants over the same period, because you eat fewer plants. There’s no way that adding entropy by eating something that ate plants somehow kills less insects, even if you want to take into account dividing up the meat between other people.
Example: steers eat 30-40lbs of feed per day for 1-2 years. Less than half of a steer is usable beef, and will give you a little less than 500 lbs of meat from a 1200 lb steer. Assuming 1/2 lb servings, that’s a little less than 1000 servings of ~500 calories for something that took years to raise and literal tons of crops like corn to be fed to it.
My point is that is more than if one person consumes the animal the environmental impact should divided between the person, based on how large part of the animal they eat.