People care too much about food waste. Food waste is a result of food being cheap. If food stops being cheap then it stops getting wasted. (And when I mean cheap I'm talking about the price its purchased at at a bulk level.)
And you're not going to convince people to cut back on meat.
I also edited my post that people are considering putting solar panels on cropland because food is so cheap.
This general line of thinking is just flawed. You don't fix global warming by reducing consumption (of any form), you do it by changing the root source of how consumption is performed while continuing to increase consumption. i.e. solar panels and wind, not coal. There is no such thing as an low per-capita energy consumption rich country. Energy efficiency begets more energy usage, not less.
The same goes for meat consumption. If meat shortages start happening people will switch to more types of meat consumption (or meat product consumption) that come from more "manufactured" sources. Plant-based meat and grown meat should be going after the areas where they can replace inputs by being a cheaper product. For example, almost no one uses leather now because leather substitutes are cheaper and good enough.
>This general line of thinking is just flawed. You don't fix global warming by reducing consumption (of any form), you do it by changing the root source of how consumption is performed while continuing to increase consumption. i.e. solar panels and wind, not coal. There is no such thing as an low per-capita energy consumption rich country. Energy efficiency begets more energy usage, not less.
This is one of those fundamental blindingly obvious points that persistently gets forgotten in debates about supposedly reducing greenhouse problems and perceived environmental waste. I've tried to explain similar in many debates and contexts, but a curiously irrational and very pervasive mentality of punitively people to go against essentially fundamental human acquisition instincts persists.
If food prices went to near zero, healthcare and housing would mysteriously get more expensive until people could barely afford them even with cheap-as-salt food.
The opposite is probably true too: if food prices went up, all of a sudden health insurance companies and landlords can lower their prices just enough to keep their customers.
I'm sure the voters would still freak the f out though.
Meat provides a lot of nutrition that crops do not. How about we "cut back" on manicured lawns instead? Ornamental grass is the single largest crop in the united states; and while some of it goes to compost which can be used to grow food, an estimated 8% of landfill waste in the united states is lawn clippings. When grass is put in landfill instead of compost it produces greenhouse gases (not to mention all the fuel used in lawnmowers and garbage trucks).
The idea that these "marginal" spaces which exist right beside where people live, eat and work cannot be used for food production is a little silly. It used to be quite common before it was cheap to have food airlifted from 10000km away. Alternately, the "wild yard" thing provides a lot of habitat for innumerable species and helps support the bird population.
