How come meat is so cheap when it costs 1/13th the water, 1/11th the oil and 1/18th of the land compared to a meat lover?

How come meat is so cheap when it costs 1/13th the water, 1/11th the oil and 1/18th of the land compared to a meat lover?

Because it is often heavily subsidized, either directly (the actual meat, dairy, or egg industries themselves), or indirectly (the particular plant crops- often wheat, corn, and soy- that become feed for these industries. Without these particular subsidies as well, the animal products wouldn't and could be nearly as cheap as they are).

I wanted to know if this goes for the meat in Holland as well

It is the same almost everywhere in the world that has access to globalized markets, because any animal production operation that tried to do otherwise would not be able to compete on price with the ones that are doing the "most efficient practices without any reference to animal welfare" and then are shipped to you.

We have chicken that is raised in the West, shipped to China to be processed by hand only because of lower labor costs, and then shipped back to be eaten, right? What I'm saying is: if there's a cheaper way to do something (or sell the illusion of providing the equivalent product, or generate the cost savings by offloading social costs or whatever), globalized markets find a way to do it. And they do the same for meat production. (The Netherlands is not immune from this. The Netherlands is part of a globalized market economy. Food can certainly be shipped into the Netherlands.)

Which means meat companies anywhere in the world can't and aren't able to compete on price if they didn't do similar things, because of the exorbitant costs that would be added to the production process if they did try to make such a thing happen.

Suppose for a second, a business did try to do this. They would necessarily have to market themselves as a "completely environmentally nondestructive" (ignoring animal ethics completely for a second) extreme luxury option that actually did manage to capture all the environmental externalities, in order to try and find consumers actually willing to pay many times the price of general, environmentally-unconcerned meat and many, many times the price of plant-based foods, and in real life that market practically doesn't exist. It's minuscule, it doesn't represent how 99.99% (this statistic is not an exaggeration) of meat is created. The fact that over 80% of cattle and 95-99% of all other land-based animal agriculture is conventional factory farming demonstrates that.

/r/vegan Thread