They wouldn’t, though. Meat is a method of refining vast quantities of cheap, safe, largely sustainable plant products into a small amount of expensive, harmful and unsustainable luxury goods. If we stopped producing meat, not only would ranchers and slaughterhouse workers be out of work, but so would the majority of the plant producers. Most of the food we grow is fed to livestock. We would only be able to use a fraction of that plant production in a post-meat world, unless we started exploiting new industrial uses for plants or something.
Well, they’d just be growing different things. I think I just solved your problem.
They wouldn’t, though. Meat is a method of refining vast quantities of cheap, safe, largely sustainable plant products into a small amount of expensive, harmful and unsustainable luxury goods. If we stopped producing meat, not only would ranchers and slaughterhouse workers be out of work, but so would the majority of the plant producers. Most of the food we grow is fed to livestock. We would only be able to use a fraction of that plant production in a post-meat world, unless we started exploiting new industrial uses for plants or something.