This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:
"Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment."
...which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.
Takeaway from the article shouldn't be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it's also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.
A couple of people have spoken to me before about wanting to cut back on, or completely cut meat from their diets, but didn't know where to start. If anyone reading this feels the same way, here's some fairly basic recipies that I usually recommend (Bosh's tofu curry is straight up one of the best currys i've ever had - even my non-vegan family members love it)
Tofu is also super versatile and is pretty climate-friendly. there's a bazillion different ways to do tofu, but simply seasoning and pan frying some extra/super firm tofu (like you do with chicken) with some peppers and onions, for fajitas, is an easy way to introduce yourself. Here's a little guide for tofu newbies: A Guide to Cooking Tofu for Beginners - The Kitchn. If you wanna level up your tofu game with some marinades here's six.
Lentils and beans are also super planet friendly, super cheap, and super versatile! You'll be able to find recipies all over that are based around lentils and beans so feel free to do a quick internet search.
Sorry for the huge, intimidating wall of text! I do hope someone interested in cutting back on meat found this useful though :)
Oh look, another article pointing the finger at the meager consumption habits of citizens and completely ignoring the massive ocean of CO2 production by large companies.
Don't people get tired of seeing this same argument being made? The amount of carbon produced by barges carrying cargo over the Atlantic so far greatly exceeds the consumption of many millions of people every single day but I'm supposed to feel guilty for eating a piece of steak today instead of some semi-edible "impossible meat" bug protein?
ETA: Nice, my first blowup since leaving reddit. Very refreshing to see some people arguing passionately. I appreciate the vigor and the quality of argumentation, everybody. The quality of discourse here is so much better than on reddit.
I'm willing to admit the "semi edible impossible meat bug protein" gamut was a bit tongue in cheek, but I recognize how it can sound genuine. I do think Impossible Meat is disgusting, but that's neither here nor there.
I eat plenty of plant matter and I regularly forage in the local forests to learn about edible plants. But I'm not going to stop enjoying steak just because it might put a bit more CO2 (why do people keep writing it as C02 online?) into the atmosphere. If removing subsidies and putting more pressure on the meat industry to be less wasteful, less environmentally impactful and more ethical towards animals causes steak to rise to $40/lb as some here have stated I'll gladly pay.
FWIW, I get my steak from local farms that are free range and grass fed. Grass feeding is healthier for the cow than the typical grain, it produces less CO2 and the steak is better quality. Plus the cows are better taken care of. Again, thanks for the great messages (generally).
In this thread: Shit loads of people who will say they care about the climate crisis on one day, then say they don't care about the 18.5% of global carbon emissions that the meat industry causes the next day because they can't get over the decade worth of anti-veganism jokes and memes that they've constantly repeated uncritically.
Individual habits MUST be changed to solve this part of the problem, there is literally no way around that. Getting triggered and writing screeds because you've spent decades getting caught up in hate over food choices won't stop the planet burning.
Every time I read about meat and greenhouse gases I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle. A cow does not produce carbon. It takes carbon from plants and releases it to the atmosphere. Then plants retake that carbon.
Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere by digging out stored carbon from the ground and bring it to the atmosphere.
So we have to fix the part where we bring additional carbon to the atmosphere. But yes, there are other environmental issues with cattle if you read the op's article.
I upvoted because this message still didn't reach everyone, but I guess it's just that people are in denial.. like, isn't this obvious? And weren't there already dozens of studies proving it?
And the type of meat changes the math significantly. Beef is notoriously inefficient and produces an insane amount of GHG emissions compared to more efficient meats like chicken, pork, and farmed fish.
It amazes me how people can wail about the record breaking heat on one hand and the effects of climate change, and sit in these comments and rationalize that eating meat isn't contributing. Of course it is.
Going vegan was the best decision I ever made for myself.
It's not really suprising, is it?
Just take two people and give them the same basics, but swap everything non vegan with the stuff those animals got to eat for one of them. Not only did he save the middle man to save on emissions, he also ended up with way more food. So you could save a lot more emissions by cutting down the vegan pile to the same amount of calories.
Replacement products bring down the comparison, but making stuff out of soy will always be more efficient than feeding soy to animals and then eating those. So with otherwise equal lifestyles a vegan will always produce less emissions.
It's not the eating it really. It's the farming and processing. I think it's important to be clear so consumers aren't stuck with all the blame.we buy what's cheap and available and their pursuit of that has lead us here.
…”than being vegan”? Look, I don’t care if you’re vegan and not and I’ll respect you if you are, but the title already makes this article sound biased and untrustworthy.
Eating meat is bad, but this won’t be solved by individual action. Putting a cost on every ton of beef, plastic, and carbon created would create market conditions that would reduce the production of these things and hence the consumption
Articles like this are dumb... This just puts the burdon on everyday people who are doomed to fail if they try. If the entire world turned vegan would it make a difference? Rather, how about some tough legislation against the top polluting companies responsible for climate change... That would mean some politicians would have to refuse a few bribes, tough I know, but any level of effort here will create more results than a world giving up meat
IMO people should've dialed down their meat consume for years, everybody knows what it's doing. I'm not a vegetarian by any means (I love many veggy recipes though & I adore good (!) tofu), we (my family) are getting meat from organic farms or from hunters for years, that's more expensive but 2 times a week is absolutely sufficient. Same price as before, roughly. Even my meat devouring daughter thinks like that, but she gets real cranky after 5 days of lentils, bulgur wheat and paprika ;)
As usual, the title is clickbait. It's not "eating meat" that produces 4 times more greenhouse gases, it's a high-meat diet. Big difference that is conveniently left out of the title to get more clicks.
You don't need to cut meat out of your diet to make an impact!
Cut your meat intake down to just ONE meal a day. That's it! If everyone did that, it would make an absolutely tremendous impact.
Start noticing how often you eat meat. Many people eat meat for literally every single meal and don't even realize it, it's so ubiquitous in most societies.
Can anyone explain to me why being vegan is the new cool, while being vegetarian is equal to eating meat without eating meat? Like, when I'm looking for vegetarian recipes, I only see vegan recipes, no vegetarian ones anywhere.
This study misses two major things that need to be considered to properly evaluate a majority vegan diet for the population vs a diet that has meat. Whatever your personal thoughts, we should be able to agree that we don't have a full picture without this information.
What are emissions, land use, and water use going to look like if vegan food production is scaled up to provide the same calories that a diet with meat has? This is a nontrivial consideration especially since meat is more calorie dense. You will need a larger quantity of vegan options to match a caloric equivalent of meat.
Humans need amino acids that are only found in meat for our full health. This is easy enough to counteract by taking vitamin supplements, but if the entire world needed to take these supplements regularly, what sort of emissions and water use would the scaled up production have? Is manufacturing a high quantity of necessary vitamins going to be better environmentally? I honestly don't know.
Assuming we want the global population to have at least the same food access and nutrition as today, these are questions we need to know the answer to. Maybe the points I've raised are easily addressed without significant emissions. That would be fantastic -- we just need to have a full picture.
Hate the game, not the players. If we eat them, others will substitute them. We need legal changes just like we had for abolishing formal human slavery
I always thought about meat, poultry, fish and eggs. And, again, always thought "what do strength champions eat?" Simple Google search show small amount of vegan champions, most of them stamina/speed champions, and some of those turned vegans after 20/30 years of omnivorous diet. And not taking into account their "supplements." Just thinking out loud.
No food is "problem free" and, much like normal agriculture where different crops cause different problems, different meats (poultry, pig, cow) cause different problems and have different costs.
Are insects a valid protein source? Apparently yes! Am I willing to eat them? Maybe! I've never had the chance to try any, none of the markets I go to stock anything like that.
Ditching all meats for soy and other vegetal proteins? Doable, but more expensive than eating chicken or pig, in my case. Fully getting rid of eggs and milk is also problematic for me because they are even cheaper than the meat itself.
You know what would be really funny? If cattle ranchers were forced to come up with big diapers for all the cows, harvesting the methane and turning that into somewhat cheap extra gas for cooking.
Since it isn't mentioned in the article, here is the reference: paper (2014)
In the study it even shows how driving a 10 years car for 6000 miles is rougly two years of saved emission with a meat->vegan switch.
I don't know, changing dietary is obviously good for the health, but these results seems to make pretty useless changes, use the bike and save twice as much.
EDIT: There is a new paper (2023), it is in a reply.
It's not because of meat it's because of unsustainable farming practices being used on a massive scale. Implement some fucking laws about it and maybe we wouldn't have this problem
People can't think critically over why they prefer meat over vegetables. They just think they do it because hurr durr meat tastes better or you need protines.
If they actually think about the fact that they have been eating meat for every meal since they were a child they might understand that it is just a habit they have formed.
I strongly suggest to those people to try to have 1 dinner a week without meat or fish. It has nothing todo about taste and all about habits and what you are used to.
Try to challenge yourself a little bit and you might get a better perspective over these things.
The TLDR: Here, you need to eat these grass clippings to save the planet. Never mind every store you go to has items made-of and encased in plastic. Never mind that your fuel efficient car is made of plastic. Never mind the climate spokespeople that live in houses and fly in private jets have an environmental impact of small cities. Listen to them tell you what to eat and how to live, just don't question what they eat and how they live. If there is going to be real change, we won't have yearly cellphone upgrades. Items will packaged in biodegradable materials. We won't have same-day delivery for anything. Hospitals and medical offices will go back to glass, metal and reusables. They will sterilize instead of throwing away. Items will be repairable instead of refuse when they break. The burden has always been placed on the individual, but a company is given a pass because they say good things, not do good things.
The vegan agenda shows when they crumple everything animal under "meat" and everything vegetable under "vegan", when there are some vegan foods that have higher cost to the environment to be produced than some animal products, when comparing nutrition to nutrition values.
I was just talking about this idea with a friend. We decided it would be political suicide in the US for anyone to suggest eating less meat.
People would literally rather see the world burn than give up their chicken nuggets.
I'm not even hardcore vegetarian. I looked at the situation and agreed it's hard to ethically justify eating meat. So I started eating less. I'm down to pretty much just "sometimes I get a pizza slice with a meat topping if there's nothing good without meat". Maybe I'll cut that out too one day.
Can't we all just agree 8 billion people is silly? Think about how much of it is just completely redundant. The main focus really should be massive population reduction.
Edit: Also, no, I don't mean killing off anyone, just reducing birth rates will do fine. We know even just a simple high school education reduces birth rates.
Who gives a fuck about greenhouse gasses. All the creatures we create are our children, and all are owed the unconditional love and protection of their creators. The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. It harms us when we take pleasure in cruelty and violence.
You work so hard to block out that simple reality. The destruction of climate, personal health, and ecosystems, those are all just incidental to the atrocity that we are committing on intelligent creatures. You cannot enjoy a cheeseburger or bacontho while you are watching Dominion. Your enjoyment is predicated on fucking DENIAL.
Vegans: "all you have to do to save the planet is to turn your back on millions of years of evolution, and one of the few sources of pleasure remaining to you in your day to day life... And convince everyone else in the world to do the same! ... And then, we will have maybe made a partial dent in climate change ... But not enough to actually really change our prospects in any meaningful way ... And also, we used bad science to come up with this plan to begin with."
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector gives a good breakdown of the worlds C02 production. Electricity and basic household use combined with transport are 73% of the problem. Livestock is 5.8%.
If every person on the planet installed Solar panels and completely removed their grid electricity and gas usage and replaced their car with an electric vehicle and didn’t use planes we could address 10.9% + 11.9% + 1.9% = 24.7% of all CO2 production. If we all gave up all meat then we could raise that to 30.5%. Its less than that however because only 60% of personal transit is actually passenger vehicles, not all aviation is people, some tiny amount of emissions for cement is going to be personal etc etc. That is the grand total that we have control over with personal replacement and some consumer choice and some of that livestock would go into other protein sources. The rest is all businesses and building and waste management that if we stopped using would no longer be developed nations and that we have no control over how its powered. Its fair to say business is responsible for reducing emissions of at least 70% of the problem.
I would also argue that there is no particular reason for consumers to be responsible for electricity CO2 production either when CO2 free alternatives exist, we might have the option to buy solar, wind and batteries but the grid is a better place to fix that in the same model so I think we could argue reasonable its even less we are directly responsible for. All of this is consumption for us and the economy, no people means no CO2 production but any CO2 we don’t directly emit (a car is direct as is a gas cooker or a wood burner) isn’t our fault its the business that burnt it to deliver that service/energy and we don’t get to control it so we can’t be held responsible for it.
The entire goal is to transition our lifestyles into something sustainable not to go back to there being 10,000 of us living like cavemen.
It largely depends on the way the meat is produced.
You may have beef that is corn fed so you use all the energy of multiple times more corn production and transport to feed them vs. just eating the corn.
Or you may have ranched grass fed beef that eats grass in a field that required nothing other than a fence. No plowing, destroying soil with pesticides and running heavy machinery. A few hundred years ago there were 3 times more roaming bison than there are cows in the US today, so gas isn’t really an issue.
Best reason to go cut down on meat is for health reasons. And be careful of where your meat is sourced.
Correction: it is a factor of 2 not 3. See reply for source.
What about soy derivates being used as estrogens by the body suppressing testosterone.
Plus to keep soy fields you have to spray more pesticides than everything else.
Too many generalisations made about vegan v meat eating alternative land use i feel. Dont doubt any of the studies but the assumption that you can flip land use from animal farming to other agriculture isn't always that straight forward as the land and environment isn't always suitable.
Maybe coordinated land use optimization based on local enviroment and food provision would be a more sensible approach.