This argument - which I see often - ignores that land doesn’t have to be used for growing crops or grazing. Leaving some land wild allows biodiversity which has quite literally unquantifiable benefits now and far into the future. Using less land in total let’s us leave more land wild, and/or to put solar panels on it, or put it to other uses that may be beneficial.
Further, some of that land which is unsuitable for growing crops used to be - and was degraded by growing crops or grazing. Further degrading and depleting it doesn’t do us any favors.
Land doesn't have to be used for anything, unless you want to do things.
The point is that grazing is much less destructive to the original ecology than farming, so it's not clear that 1 acre of farming is better than 100 acres of grazing.
I might be misguided here, but AFAIK grazing doesn't "deplete" the land at all (and might even improve the land with manure / etc), where as farming absolutely does unless you're careful about it.
Right, but I don't think anyone in this thread is arguing that Beyond Burgers don't scale better – people are merely pushing back against the idea that we should eliminate all consumption of meat and that all methods of raising such are objectively worse than such alternatives.
Further, some of that land which is unsuitable for growing crops used to be - and was degraded by growing crops or grazing. Further degrading and depleting it doesn’t do us any favors.