Is meat-eating morally wrong?

[ArnoldRimmer]

There's nothing inherently "wrong" about eating meat. And yet, it is problematic nevertheless.

But the problem has nothing to do with suffering animals. The problem is that producing meat is very ressource-hungry and inefficient. To produce, say, 1.000 calories of beef, you first need to feed that cow about 10.000 calories. In other words, feeding the whole human race with vegetables would require just a fraction of the farmland required to feed everyone with meat.

Eating meat shouldn't be considered in terms of "right" or "wrong". This isn't a matter of black or white. Instead, there should be more awareness that eating meat is a kind of luxury that we should consume on a moderate level. For my parents born just a few decades ago, meat was still so luxury that sunday was the only day of the week when they would afford it.

And in just a few decades from now, with several billion additional humans on earth, people's attitude towards meat will be different again. Meat consumption will not only be lower in general because meat will become very expensive, there'll also be a shift towards more ressource-efficient types of meat. The prospect of eating insects like grasshoppers might make us want to vomit. For our grandchildren, the same prospect might be what they're looking forward to all week.