Easy to Be Vegan

Vegan recipes, cruelty-free products, vegan/cruelty-free/environmental information, cute animals, and other social issues stuff

[nocylipcowa]

everyone living in EU - please support the citizens initiative for safe and accessible abortion!!

[nixie-dantes-belvedere]

If I may, I'll use this as an opportunity to also share this EU citizens' initiative to ban the conversion therapy

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

[prideknights]

I do not request reblogs often, but reblog this no matter where you are from so people from the EU can see and sign this. Please. Let's make a difference. Thank you! ⚔️🌈

[easytobevegan]

Caponata

This is a vegan-friendly/plant-based adaptation of the recipe "Caponata" from the 1993 cookbook Betty Crocker's New Choices Cookbook.

Ingredients:

1 medium onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 Tbsp olive oil

2 medium eggplants, peeled and chopped

1 large tomato, chopped

2 Tbsp chopped fresh basil (or 2 tsp dried basil)

2 Tbsp red wine vinegar

1/8 tsp salt

1/4 tsp ground black pepper

Instructions:

Cook onion and garlic in the olive oil in a large skillet/pot over medium heat for about 3 minutes, until the onion is tender. Stir in the eggplant and tomato. Cook uncovered for about 10 minutes, until the eggplant is tender. Stir in the basil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. Serve with crackers or toasted bread.

Crocker, Betty. "Caponata." Betty Crocker's New Choices Cookbook. New York: Prentice Hall, 1993. 37. Print.

[easytobevegan]

Artichokes with Basil Sauce

This is a vegan-friendly/plant-based adaptation of the recipe "Chilled Artichokes with Basil Sauce" from the 1993 cookbook Betty Crocker's New Choices Cookbook.

Ingredients:

1/2 of a 12.3 oz block of firm silken tofu*

juice of half a small lemon

1/2 cup fresh basil

3 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

4 oz dairy-free cream cheese*

1 medium red bell pepper, chopped

2 large globe artichokes, steamed and chilled

Instructions:

Place all ingredients except red bell pepper and artichokes in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth. Remove blades (or put sauce in a bowl if your blades aren't detachable) and stir in the red bell pepper. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Place a steamer basket insert in a large pot and fill it with water up to a little under the basket. Cut off the bottom quarter of the artichoke stems and peel the remainder. Cut off the tops of the artichokes, about a 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down, and trim off any spikey bits on the remaining leaves. Steam the artichokes until tender and the leaves start pulling away from the body of the chokes, about 30-40 minutes. Allow to cool before peeling off leaves. Discard the chokes (the fuzzy bit inside) and place the leaves, stems, and artichoke hearts in the fridge to chill. Serve chilled artichokes with the basil sauce.

Notes:

Silken Tofu - I used the shelf-stable Morinaga brand silken tofu, which comes in 12.3 oz blocks. It's okay if the amount of tofu you use isn't the same as mine. I didn't weigh or measure it; I just eyeballed the block and cut about half off. A little more or less won't hurt anything.

Cream Cheese - You can use whatever recipe or store-bought vegan cream cheese you want, but I've only used Violife as a cream cheese substitute, so use something else at your discretion. Like with the silken tofu, I didn't measure or weigh the cream cheese block to exactly 4 oz; I just eyeballed an 8 oz block and cut about half off. A little more or less won't hurt anything.

Crocker, Betty. "Chilled Artichokes with Basil Sauce." Betty Crocker's New Choices Cookbook. New York: Prentice Hall, 1993. 37. Print.

[easytobevegan]

Savory Mushroom Strata

This is a vegan-friendly/plant-based adaptation of the recipe "Savory Mushroom Strata" from the 1993 cookbook Betty Crocker's New Choices Cookbook.

Ingredients:

1 cup chopped mushrooms

1 cup dairy-free cottage cheese *

1/4 cup chopped green onions

1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary (or 1/2 tsp dried rosemary)

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

12 slices hard bread (such as sourdough or ciabatta)

1 batch of the "egg" mixture in this recipe from From My Bowl *

1/2 cup shredded mild dairy-free cheese *

Instructions:

Lightly grease 9x9 inch baking dish.

In a bowl, mix the mushrooms, cottage cheese, green onions, rosemary, and garlic.

Place 4 slices of bread in the baking dish. Spread half of the mushroom mixture on the bread. Pour 1/3 of the "egg" mixture on top. Layer 4 more slices topped with the other half of the mushroom mixture in the dish. Pour another 1/3 of the "egg" mixture on top. Place the last 4 slices of bread on the previous layer, add the rest of the "egg" mixture, and top with the shredded cheese. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake uncovered 1 hour, until "egg" has thickened. Let set at least 10 minutes before serving.

Notes:

Cottage Cheese - I used this recipe from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken, but you can use whatever recipe you like or purchase pre-made vegan-friendly cottage cheese if it's available in your area.

"Egg" mixture - The original recipe calls for "1 1/2 cups low-fat milk" and "1 cup cholesterol-free egg product or 6 egg whites." If you don't want to use the recipe I linked in the ingredients list, you could try using 1 1/2 cups plant-based milk and 1 cup store-bought plant-based liquid "egg." Just whisk the two ingredients together and use the mixture the same way as the recipe above says.

Shredded Cheese - I used Violife Colby Jack shreds, but feel free to use whatever mild, vegan-friendly cheese substitute you prefer.

Crocker, Betty. "Savory Mushroom Strata." Betty Crocker's New Choices Cookbook. Ed. Karen Couné. New York: Prentice Hall, 1993. 315. Print.

[cryptocommie]

My veganism is about non-humans, but it’s not the only facet of my activism and morality and if you honestly believe that caring about other species means you can’t also care about humanity, your scope of empathy must be very small, and I’m so sorry.

[aloeverawrites]

Non vegan leftists will stand with activists against corporations on just about every issue but when animal rights activists come into the picture they’re defending animal agriculture against other activists.

Could you explain to me how this one industry is ethical even though we know the rest of them is doing some pretty shady stuff. How did the killing animals and using their bodies for money industry get to be so humane and exploitation free, enlighten me.

It’s all workers rights until you need someone to spend hours a day killing animals. Very workers rights until yet another farmer gets trampled by a cow and we have to turn a blind eye to it. Because cheese.

I’m just saying since most people can be healthy on a vegan diet, I don’t think it’s ethical to support factory farming (which 90% of farm animals are on factory farms) and animal and human exploitation. If we can avoid harming animals, and putting humans in dangerous situations, we should.

[panicmixiescreamhurl]

Vegans are fundamentally against exploitation and cruelty towards animals, which includes killing and eating them.

So when carnists ask us to respect their choice to eat meat, they’re asking us to respect animal cruelty.

Which is, y'know, what we’re fundamentally against. Really, this isn’t that difficult.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[anarchistmemedistro]

The liquidity crisis currently wiping billions off global stock markets is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Beneath the credit crunch and

[rachandruin]

A lot of people don't understand that the reason we agitate for political action to dismantle capitalism and replace it with something better is not because it won't collapse on its own, but because it will.

Capitalism is destined, doomed, to fail. Its own ethos of expansion at all costs, of prioritising profit over human life and Earth itself, means there will inevitably come a day when there is nothing left to make. Every drop of fuel, every scrap of biomass, every gram of ore will have been used up in its ceaseless quest to make Things, which no-one now has any money to buy. Capitalism is a death spiral and, left unchecked, will take down the entire planet.

Agitating for change now, and putting those changes into practice, is the equivalent of demolishing a dilapidated building; it'll be messy, and slow, and it'll take time to clear the rubble away, but the alternative is the building collapses and kills everyone.

[less-freshly-vegan]

Like "veganism is good for the environment" and "we should all be vegans" are generalisations. Sure, there are going to be cases wherein someone should not be vegan or in which all their food is magically super sustainable because they grow it all on their own farm and just eat 1 egg a day from their tiny little chicken coop because they need protein and absolutely can't get beans etc.

And frankly I'm kinda feeling right now like...deal with the generalisation? When I see "running is good for you" stuff or "we should all be exercising more" I don't go on a long rant about how omg I can't run and not everyone should be exercising so this article is bad actually. I accept it's not about me and move on.

When someone says "murder is bad" I assume they don't think it's bad if in self-defence. I don't need them to clarify when they think murder isn't awful, because yeah, most of the time murder is not good lol.

Pretty much every social justice movement makes generalisations. It's primarily because going "X is good unless..." waters down what you're saying and distracts from the point. For example look at all the people who bring up why some people can't be vegan despite not being in those groups themselves. It's a distraction so they don't need to think about their own motives.

(I've literally had people living on over 5k a month telling me about how veganism is bad because not everyone can afford fake meat, for example. Like mate that's extremely unrelated to why you are not going vegan.)

I just get tired of being expected to clarify every single exception to veganism. I don't care to argue over the "nuance" of "veganism is good for the environment" just as I don't care to argue the "nuance" of "running is a good form of exercise". Would eating vegan for you personally genuinely be worse for the environment? Okay, cool. Don't care, too busy trying to explain to everyone else why their beef burger is shit for our planet.

[closet-keys]

I’ve been practicing veganism since I was a teenager & I’m now in my 30s so I’ve seen a lot of discourses on veganism come and go and recirculate and that’s worthy of analysis probably,

but one thing that has been a constant the whole time is this bizarre exchange where people will ask me if I’m vegan “for ethical or health reasons” where there is a subtextual and preloaded expectation that answering “ethical” is incorrect and worse.

but, like it’s easy to spot that mainstream rhetorics of “health” when the subject is food (even though veganism is not a diet, that’s what people hear when I say “vegan” so this is the immediate lens through which they filter everything I say) are just dogwhistling fatphobia. Like we all can acknowledge this, yes?

so the underlying question is really:

“do you abstain from this food out of political boycott within a particular ethical framework, or are you just on a diet to Get Skinny?” and if you refuse the implicit fatphobia/healthism then people immediately assume you’re a bad person.

like they can sympathize with diet culture and fatphobic discourses, but you’re completely alien if you have more complex political goals.

it’s just wild to me how often this interaction plays out, and how uncomfortable people are when I refuse to play the role of the “health concerned plant based dieter who eats exclusively ‘unprocessed’ foods and raw produce”

like nah, I want to abolish capitalism actually! I want systems of large scale food production to be freed from imperialism and colonialism. I think it’s fucked up that we have socially constructed the concept of “animality” to have the properties of “can be bought, owned, and sold” and “outside of moral concern”— especially when the entire existence of this construct has been a history littered with various human groups being sorted into this category! Animality is a central logic of enslavement, colonization, and genocide. It’s not a coincidence that populations being subject to these violent forces are always compared to an animal— that’s the logic of the construct. It exists to justify routine normalized death and cruelty. eugenics as a practice can’t be separated from animal agriculture and the mechanized controlling of bodies to be useful to capitalism. foundational eugenic texts are full of direct references to these comparisons with agriculture. eugenic ideas continue to rest in our ideas about animals, ready to be applied to human populations whenever it benefits capital.

but you don’t want to hear that. you want reassurance that I hate fat people instead. that’s the preferable answer to you. right. sure.

[whats-this-mustelid]

I just think that 'animals are living intelligent creatures that have feelings and deserve to be respected' and 'when done properly farming is beneficial to both people and animals and there's nothing wrong with raising and killing animals for food, clothing, and other products' are concepts that very much can and should coexist

[acti-veg]

Do none of you find it extremely convenient that the belief you all agree with just so happens to require next to no action on your behalf to demonstrate that belief? That by far the most popular view on this topic is the one that fits all of your existing consumer decisions?

This is the overwhelmingly dominant viewpoint for good reason. Animal agriculture corporations spend millions reinforcing the contradiction that we can somehow breed, exploit, and slaughter billions of animals and have it be humane. Welfarism is the comfortable lie we are subjected to in advertising, with the packages of smiling cows advertising their own flesh and secretions, and reinforced for free by blogs like this one. I used to think this way, too.

The truth of the matter though, is that there is just no way to exploit an animal, slit their throat, cut them to pieces then wrap their flesh in plastic to sell as a commodity and have it be ‘respectful’ in any meaningful sense of the word. Yes, we can argue for high welfare standards, for more space, for more ‘humane’ conditions - whatever that means. But that is not how the meat, dairy, and eggs that almost everyone is eating actually come from. The vast majority of meat, dairy, eggs and animal fabrics come from factory-farmed animals. If ‘done properly’ means respectful, sustainable, and humane, then almost nobody is farming ‘properly.’

The classic counter here is that ‘well we need reform, not abolition!’ Ignoring the fact that if you really believed that reform is needed to make farming ‘respectful’ then you’d be boycotting until that happens, nobody ever wants to spell out what reform actually looks like. There is a reason animals are factory farmed, because it is more efficient, uses less land and resources, and can feed more people than traditional pasture-based methods.

Even with factory farming, it is estimated that 1kg of meat requires at least 2.8kg of human-edible crops. The land use of livestock is so large because it takes around 100 times as much land to produce a kilocalorie of beef or lamb versus plant-based alternatives. Similarly, it takes almost 100 times as much land to produce a gram of protein from beef or lamb, versus peas or tofu. Much of the land devoted to growing crops like alfalfa exclusively for animal feed, could also be far better used to feed millions of humans.

Alongside this food waste, animal agriculture uses an unconscionable amount of water. Global water consumption ranges from 34 to 76 trillion gallons annually, approximately one-fifth of that water is consumed by animal agriculture alone. Most water is not used for consumers but for agriculture, and 29% of the total water footprint of global agriculture is related to the production of animal products

This is all under the most efficient system we have - which is factory farming, the only way to meet anything even approaching our current levels of demand (which is rising rapidly). The idea that we can continue to use animal products at anything even close to the same volume and frequency we do now, and have those animals pasture-raised, grass-fed, and somehow slaughtered painlessly, while being affordable for the average consumer, is pure fantasy. The current global diet uses around 4.13 billion hectares of land, which is about half of all the world’s habitable land. Of this, approximately 80% is used as pastureland and croplands to produce meat and dairy alone. Do we really want to use vastly more than we already do, which is what would be required to abolish cruel factory-farming? As for what that would actually look like, I'll quote from George Monbiot's excellent and thoroughly researched book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet.

'Only when livestock numbers fall so far that their husbandry scarcely qualifies as food production is animal farming compatible with a rich, functional ecosystem. For example, the Knepp Wildland project, run by my friends Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, where small herds of cattle and pigs roam freely across a large estate, is often cited as an example of how meat and wildlife and can be reconciled (..)'

'If their system were to be rolled out across 10 per cent of the UK’s farmland, and if, as it’s champions propose, we obtained our meat this way, it would furnish each of the people of the United Kingdom with 420 grams per head, enough for around three meals. This means a 99.5 per cent cut in our consumption (…) If all the farmland in the U.K. were managed this way, it would provide us with 75kcal per day (one thirteenth of our requirement) in the form of meat, and nothing else.'

So what exactly does 'proper' farming look like, and how is it viable? Can you show us examples of it actually being done at scale? What do 'proper farms' do with male calves in the dairy industry, or their spent mothers when they aren't producing milk? What do they do with sheep when their profitability declines? What happens to their lambs every season? What do they do with male chickens in the egg industry? How do they slaughter thousands of animals, at the speeds and in the quantities required, cheaply and efficiently enough to meet the demand of everyone who believes in high welfare farming, and have it be anything even resembling 'respectful,' sustainable or affordable?

Let's be generous and say that all this is somehow possible, that we can somehow meet rising demand while making farming less environmentally destructive and less horrifically cruel, animals could free roam, they are killed later in life than they are now, and we somehow do this without pricing out anyone but the rich. Even in this highly idealised scenario, which exists pretty much only in the fantasies of animal agriculture corporations, industry lobbyists and shills, exploiting and slaughtering animals for profit would still not be respectful.

Exploiting someone for profit is wholly antithetical to respecting them, which is a concept that most people already agree with, unless the victim belongs to a group we think is inferior, or when we stand to personally benefit from their exploitation - in this case both are true. Even if we discount the horrendous conditions, even if we pretend we can slaughter this volume of animals at speed and have it be painless, the entire industry would still be based on exploitation, which is fundamentally failing to respect the rights of animals to live free, autonomous and full lives.

We breed sheep to produce so much wool that they overheat without shearing, we produce turkeys who are so fat they can barely walk, cows who produce too much milk and suffer with mastitis, chickens who produce hundreds of eggs at massive cost to their health, and pigs who grow too big for their bone structure to even support them. How respectful is any of this?

I know that we all want to pretend that you can both respect someone and eat their ribs for dinner, but the uncomfortable truth is that respect, dignity and love require behaviours from us to back them up, if they are going to be anything other than empty platitudes. Buying the flesh, secretions, or fabrics from someone's body, knowing they have been bred, exploited and usually killed explicitly for that purpose, is not loving or respectful.

The entire enterprise of breeding animals into unhealthy bodies, exploiting then slaughtering them for profit or personal gain is not compatible with having a respectful relationship with them. Respecting animals means not exploiting them, and never intentionally causing them harm, at least to the best of our ability. As members of consumer societies, most of whom absolutely do have the ability to do so, the only way we can personally do that is to be vegan.

[thoughtportal]

The US Military in Hawaii

[technofeudalism]

i feel like i'm watching a car crash in slow motion

[orgyofthedamned]

this strain of H5N1 is highly deadly to cats. please keep your cats indoors this summer.

Four more cats die from H5N1 as new report calls evidence for efficient mammal-to-mammal transmission "unprecedented"

A new report calls evidence for efficient mammal-to-mammal transmission if h5n1, avian flu, "unprecedented"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.22.595317v1

[acti-veg]

But we’ll all keep funding them anyway…

[acti-veg]

This was a flippant comment out of exasperation but I have much more to say on this.

If you had to design a perfect testing and proliferation environment for the next pandemic, you literally could not do much more than what factory farms already do. These are environments where thousands of animals are kept in filthy, crowded environments and are fed antibiotics to avoid the illnesses that would naturally result from these environments.

Emergent pathogens have multiple opportunities to jump between individuals, and between species. At the end of this process, they also have a guaranteed opportunity to make it into the human food chain, in large volumes. A single factory farm can raise and kill 500,000 animals in a year. Now imagine an antibiotic-resistant disease emerging in one of these facilities. We all play lip service to the idea that factory farming is bad and we should avoid it, but in reality, that is where the vast majority of us are getting our meat, dairy and eggs from. Almost all fast food, almost all meat in all western supermarkets, most chickens are factory farmed, and almost all pigs are. All told, it is estimated that 99% of animals in the US are factory farmed. The figures in the rest of the Western world and much of Asia are better, but quickly getting worse.

When we talk about antibiotic resistance, we think of our doctors refusing to prescribe antibiotics for common illnesses unless there is no other option. However, an estimated 73% of all antibiotics worldwide are used in agriculture. That is where antibiotics are failing, and that is where pathogens are getting the opportunity to adapt to antibiotic use. Back in 2015, Chinese, British, and US universities announced in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases that they hadidentified a new form of resistance, to the very last-ditch drug colistin—and that it is present in both farmed animals and people, probably comes from agricultural use of that drug, can move easily among bacteria, and may already be spreading across borders. In our waterways here in the UK, we have already found strains of bacteria that can no longer be treated by common drugs.

Clearly, it isn't just within these facilities where the risk lies. A recent report by Environmental Working Group found that more than 200 million Americans—more than half of the people in the US—are exposed to contaminated drinking water due to fertilizer pollution. The estimated clean water costs to taxpayers are more than $2 billion per year. On top of that, dumping animal manure on crops, as well as agricultural run-off, is what causes these e-coli outbreaks we see at least a dozen times a year.

Despite this, we are still not taking action, since animal agriculture interests wield huge influence through propaganda and corporate lobbying. An essay in the American Journal of Public Health commented that “changing the way humans treat animals – most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten – is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure.”

We are sleepwalking towards a public health crisis. The research is absolutely clear; if we do not radically reduce or eliminate our consumption of animals, the next pandemic will be a case of when, not if. If you are concerned about this too, the first step is to stop giving your money to the corporations behind it.

[mari-onacross]

I've been getting a lot of asks to help spread fundraisers, so I'm making this post to boost all of them as best as I can. I am NOT qualified to verify any fundraisers. I tried to make sure that all of these fundraisers have been vetted by trusted accounts.

Help @ahmed-ziad evacuate his elderly parents and siblings - gfm here (£6,365/£30,000). vetted by nabulsi.

Help @mohammedalanqer evacuate his wife and children - gfm here (€42,861/€58,000). vetted by nabulsi, 90-ghost, and fairuzfan.

Help @ahmed79ss evacuate their family - gfm here ($7,631 CAD/$50,000 CAD). vetted by 90-ghost

Help @eyadeyadsblog reunite and evacuate his family - gfm here (CHF8,962/CHF20,000). vetted by 90-ghost.

Help @ayaalanqarsblog evacuate their family - gfm here (€2,630/€15,000). vetted by 90-ghost.

Help @mahmoudkhalafff evacuate his family - gfm here (€14,365/€30,000). vetted by el-shab-hussein.

Help @mohammedaldeeb evacuate his family - gfm here (€27,447/€30,000). vetted by 90-ghost, and el-shab-hussein.

Help @mohamedjameel and his family evacuate - gfm here (€1,487/€35,000). vetted by nabulsi.

Help @emanzaqout and her family survive famine and have a secure life - gfm here ($5,077 CAD/$40,000 CAD). vetted by 90-ghost.

Help @tameraldeeb and his family evacuate - gfm here (€21,749/€40,000). vetted by el-shab-hussein and 90-ghost

Help @yazanfamily evacute - gfm here (€1,268/€50,000). I am not sure if this fundraiser has been vetted, but @/mohammedalanqer who does have a vetted gfm vouched for them here.

Help @amlanqar evacuate her children - gfm here (€1,739/€50,000). vetted by 90-ghost.

Help @ahmedabuyamin evacuate his family - gfm here (€34,027/€39,500). vetted by sar-soor.

Help @emanfamily evacuate - gfm here (€1,347/€27,000). vetted by 90-ghost.

Help @ashraf-family2 evacuate - gfm here (€9,466/€20,000). vetted by 90-ghost (the deactivated account is Ashraf's old account).

Help @musababed and family support themselves - gfm here (€1,607/€7,000). vetted by 90-ghost.

[vicholas]

I want more people to know that while the Palestine Olympic team consists of only 8 athletes, at least 69 Palestinian Olympic athletes have been killed since October 2023. This includes athletes who were going to compete in these games and retired athletes such as Majed Abu Maraheel, the first Palestinian Olympian, who died of kidney failure in a refugee camp product of lack of medical treatment.

Remember them during these games.

[acti-veg]

"It's a genocide ... ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, and the attacks on athletes and sports in particular in the Gaza Strip are all very systematic attacks to obliterate and erase sports in the territory," Abubaker Abed, a Gaza-based sports journalist told Anadolu.

Israel's intentions go further than eliminating Gaza's current athletic capacity, according to writer and lecturer Abdaljawad Omar, who held that it was part of a concerted effort by Tel Aviv to undermine Palestinians' achievements in all areas, with sports being no exception.

“Israel systemically seeks to ensure that Palestinian accomplishments and potential in all realms remain dampened and always dwarfed by its own achievements.”

[aloeverawrites]

Some people will really pretend their hatred of vegans is for social justice reasons rather than admit they like cheese. They will defend a system built on animal abuse, human exploitation and environmental destruction rather than admit it’s scary to change their diet and that they really like KFC.

Like bro please-

[vegan-wastoid]

Someone just told me being vegan was unethical because of all the deforestation to grow soy crops. Like do people really believe the amazon was destroyed so vegans could eat tofu lmao

[acti-veg]

The expansion of pasture land to raise cattle is responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation. That’s 2.1 million hectares every year – about half the size of the Netherlands. Most of this converted land came from Brazil; its expansion of beef production accounts for one-quarter (24%) of tropical deforestation. This means that most (72%) deforestation in Brazil is driven by cattle ranching.

As for soy, almost 80% of the world’s soybean crop is fed to livestock, especially for beef, chicken, egg and dairy production. Only half of the world’s croplands are used to grow crops that are consumed by humans directly. If we combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use. The vast majority of the world’s agricultural land is used to raise livestock for meat and dairy.