If by "need", you mean "need to survive", you could survive your entire life just by drinking human milk. By not eating plants, you'd be improving animal welfare even more, since agriculture kills many more animals than grazing-based animal husbandry (think all the pests that are eliminated: the rodents, insects, etc.)
As I began in my second paragraph above, people do need to eat something. Right now that means sacrifice the environment if we want to keep everyone alive in the short term.
Long term we could have farming that has zero environmental impact, like vertical farming with fully contained and controlled environment. It would cost huge amount of money and with the current economical system it would be impossible to feed everyone on the planet, but the technology is technically there.
Right now however, a person should to take into account the environmental impact that different food has. Going into a store and buying a avocado will leave the buyer with some blood on their hands. They can try to reduce the amount of blood by making a difference choice depending on how a specific food is produced, but it will be more complex than just looking if it contains meat.
Plant-based meals require far fewer resources and is cheaper, which means maintaining societal stability when resources are becoming low - as there is more to go around.
A lot of farm land is being used to grow foods for livestock. We could use that land to grow food for ourselves.
There would be far less suffering if we all lived on a plant-based diet. As well it would help in the fight against climate change, reducing environmental impacts.
If your concern is feeding as many people as possible, wouldn’t it be best to ditch animals altogether? I would imagine that it’s more energy intensive to go from plants to animals to food than to go directly from plants to food.
I do think the need part comes into play when you take into consideration resource constraints. If we end up poisoning the Earth beyond its ability to support life with rising demand for meat, we might need to stop.
One needs to kill much less plants if one avoids anymal products. Cows, pigs, dogs etc. are very inefficient at converting plants they consume into flesh that can be eaten.
You technically don’t need them if people would consume reasonable amount of animal products, which they don’t. In the actual real world we all live in the vast majority of meat comes from factory farms whose entire existence relies on feed crops and antibiotics abuse.
And feed crops are often from questionable origins.
From an environmental perspective, we actually do need to eat meat, just not the cow. Humans can't eat the only plants which can grow in marginal land areas, whereas goats and other hardy livestock can and then themselves be eaten by humans.
So the optimal diet to feed the world sustainably, currently, includes animal protein. Pure vegan is a luxury choice under that model.
We also dramatically increase the amount of plants we need to grow by feeding so much grass and grain to live stock. We can reduce the footprint of eating plants and hurting animals by not farming livestock for meat at all. It would be a net win, even with the incidental damage done by farming vegetables/grains/etc.
Do you understand the sheer amount of effort mankind must spend on soil engineering, irrigation, fertilizers and genetic engineering just to make grains that can feed people?
If we were forced to eat only natural plants (not plants genetically engineered though thousands of years of unnatural selection) then 99.9 percent of mankind would starve.
Meanwhile cows eat natural grass on natural pastures.
We need livestock if we want to live in balance with nature without irreversibly changing the structure of the Earth's biosphere.
Meat is the best food for humans — ruminants, especially, are great at processing out the various anti-nutrients plants produce to ward off being eaten & then processing it into pretty much exactly the food humans need for optimal health. Think of all the land & water that goes into crops that aren't even eaten by humans — run buffalo & cattle over that instead. That would have the secondary benefit of not monocropping (which produces all manner of negative downstream ecological effects). If you don't want healthy, thriving humans, as well as a thriving ecosystem then by all means keep pushing this plant nonsense (take a look at how much water it takes to grow one almond, & then scale that up into what it takes to make almond (or really any other plant) "milk").
Sure, there are absolutely deaths there. But the problem though is that the majority of crops we grow are grown to feed the livestock.
So you’ll still minimize the number of crop deaths by going vegan.
Even if you believe that plants are just as sentient as animals (which some people have argued to me…) then going vegan still reduces that suffering the most.
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