A cow eats more crops which kill more insects over its lifetime than you will by eating plants over the same period, because you eat fewer plants. There’s no way that adding entropy by eating something that ate plants somehow kills less insects, even if you want to take into account dividing up the meat between other people.
Example: steers eat 30-40lbs of feed per day for 1-2 years. Less than half of a steer is usable beef, and will give you a little less than 500 lbs of meat from a 1200 lb steer. Assuming 1/2 lb servings, that’s a little less than 1000 servings of ~500 calories for something that took years to raise and literal tons of crops like corn to be fed to it.
My point is that is more than if one person consumes the animal the environmental impact should divided between the person, based on how large part of the animal they eat.
A cow eats more crops which kill more insects over its lifetime than you will by eating plants over the same period, because you eat fewer plants. There’s no way that adding entropy by eating something that ate plants somehow kills less insects, even if you want to take into account dividing up the meat between other people.
Example: steers eat 30-40lbs of feed per day for 1-2 years. Less than half of a steer is usable beef, and will give you a little less than 500 lbs of meat from a 1200 lb steer. Assuming 1/2 lb servings, that’s a little less than 1000 servings of ~500 calories for something that took years to raise and literal tons of crops like corn to be fed to it.
My point is that is more than if one person consumes the animal the environmental impact should divided between the person, based on how large part of the animal they eat.