3D-printed steak - GIF

[nova_robotics]

All that has little to do with my original question, but your diatribe has raised another question, if grown for meat livestock are taken out of the equation and a huge amount of resources such as fuel, fertiliser etc are channeled into growing and processing alternative food sources will it be any less polluting than growing and processing livestock feed?
There are many mouths to feed on this planet, and there are many problems associated with doing so, if more time was spent on improving existing practices rather than trying to reinvent what has taken thousands of years to achieve I think we would arrive at a better outcome sooner.

Beef has one of the worst feed conversion ratios around. To get one unit of food energy from beef, that cow has to eat around 15 units of plant energy. Chicken is much better at around 3-to-1. So if you had farmland and were growing a crop, lets say that crop could directly feed 100 mouths. If you were to take that crop and use it to feed chickens, your land could now feed 33 people. If you were raising cows, with that same farmland you could now feed 7 people. If food becomes scarce, you would be starving 93 of the original 100 people by raising cows. You're throwing away over 90% of the food energy. So yes, it's extremely polluting.