Dataset confirms that a vegan diet is dramatically better across a range of environmental measures
Dataset confirms that a vegan diet is dramatically better across a range of environmental measures
It's an article about environmental impact
"The impacts of vegans were a quarter of those of high meat eaters for greenhouse gas emissions, and land use, just 27% of the impacts for water pollution, 46% for water use and 34% for biodiversity. "
But let's be honest, you probably dont care, no one seems to care. People who do care are unusual and caring and taking action is unusual and might even earn you derision.
Personally I'm still trying to figure out whether there's any point in trying to change anyone's mind. I have a feeling it's a hopeless waste of energy, which is terrible. If the people do do care lose all will to try to encourage others to see what seems obvious then nothing will get better, it will probably get worse.
I don't think convincing average people to go 100% full vegan is a good strategy. What I would focus on is convincing people to eat less meat, eggs, dairy, etc. It can be a gradual process to even further reduction, or even just a permanent flat reduction is still an improvement.
Convincing two people to reduce their animal consumption by 50% is as good as convincing one person to go full vegan.
i think ed winters has changed his focus from moralizing and guilt-tripping and is now actively trying to make vegan foods more available/accessible. so i don't even think you need to talk about meat at all: just offer people food that happens to be vegan. and i don't mean trick them into eating a soyburger: just make food that is naturally vegan and tastey and then that's the meal someone has eaten instead of a meaty one.
I think a solution is going to be less about changing minds, and more about changing incentives.
Meat-free food should be cheaper and easier. Walking into a supermarket or convenience store, one should be greeted with affordable, tasty, plant-based meals. The more affordable and accessible we make plant-based meals, the more people are going to eat them. And showing people that they can taste just as good as meat-based meals, will mean people won't immediately steer clear of them.
Of course this is just one anecdote, but I stopped eating meat for the climate, because of the numbers. People posting papers, making informative comments (like your first half) changed my mind.
Same, it’s one of the good things that I got from being on Reddit/Feddit.
That's encouraging
I don't think you can change many minds. It would be more effective to make factory farming illegal so that meat prices increase dramatically. People will eat less meat when they can't afford not to.
Again, factory farming seems so, totally, horrific it's obvious that it should be consigned to history.
But feeling that way is something that only a tiny minority of people seem to share. Most people just don't care.
People love meat and are willing to totally ignore the suffering behind it. Never mind environmental impacts. .
Animal products were and should be again luxury products.
That would be nice, but in a democracy, no one is going to vote to inconvenience to themselves. We have to find motivation by other means than being forced, or we will create a society where nothing good happens without being forced to.
No individual average person can do anything of significance to fight climate change or have a meaningful impact on the global environment. Only governments or massive organizations can.
If you could do an alternate reality type thing, where one version of you lives a perfect life, environmentally speaking, and the other version lives the worst, the world would be the same at the end of both.
Its not about one person preventing climate change alone, first step is not supporting climate change. Then people around you see that it's not black magic and that they can do it too. We are now at 2%, 3%? vegans. A change in society needs 10% to have a critical mass. If you decide to go vegan, for the animals, for the climate, for your health, and make others think about and maybe even change one other persons view you did better than most.
If you don't you are not passive, you are actively supporting it and showing others that its OK.
Governments will not act against the will of the voters alone. They have to have some support to even consider making change. Massive organizations live from the participation from people, from you.
But let's be honest, you probably dont care, no one seems to care. People who do care are unusual and caring and taking action is unusual and might even earn you derision.
That’s not really true is it? There have never been more, better and more popular vegan food options. And while the number of actual vegans is (still?) low, the “less meat” contingent is growing every second.
We have definitely rounded a corner here.
And I haven’t seen any outright derision of vegetarians of vegans since I left college. And that was a long time ago.
If you think I'm going without the odd sausage roll, pizza, spagbol or chippy tea when we've got near-billionaire cunts like Sunak whizzing about the place in private jets, allowing companies to extract more gas from the North Sea, and going on mad rants about anti-car policies, you can think again.
The world is miserable enough without having to eat vegan food.
Yeah I totally get your point. And if everyone thinks like you we're all definitely fucked
I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, but vegan food is for the most part absolutely awesome and not "miserable" in the slightest. I've had to seriously cut back on meat for health reasons, and I've discovered...I just don't miss meat. Vegan/vegetarian food is often just better.
No shit? Is this not obvious and generally understood?
No, I think you're in a bubble if you think that
look, a vegan diet isn't perfect, but I'm genuinely confused - literally every single animal product, meat or otherwise, takes at least several pounds of plant matter per pound of product, often dozens or hundreds of pounds of plant matter per pound of product. This is the basic physics of metabolism and energy conservation. This doesn't even regard the extra energy and equipment of shipping around feed, clear-cutting land, building structures, using dozens to hundreds of times more water, and using far more fertilizer and farming energy to make feed. Do you have an argument that eating meat is better for the climate, or is this objection all based on vibes?
Ohhh I most definitely am in a bubble. But it's also just common sense. You have to produce plant food, then ship the food to cows for them to eat and grow then to be killed and eaten. And it's not like you put 60 kilos in and you get 60 kilos of meat. Just look at yourself for an example. So it's only natural that if you simply feed the plants to the humans it would be better in every way. People should know this shit mate.
I asked how bad this really is: to produce one kilogram of beef requires 25 kilograms of grain – to feed the animal – and roughly 15,000 litres of water
EDIT: Ignore ... I didn't realise this was all about the environment ... though that being said ... it's basic common sense ... each stage of processing adds inefficiencies.
It's fairly universal common sense that plenty of fruit and vegetables and core to a healthy diet. From there it really isn't a stretch to at least wonder whether going vegan is pretty healthy. The only things that would preclude such an idea from seeming feasible are probably propaganda around dairy and meta products, unfortunately. But even then, you can start thinking about the health problems of red meat and high fat diets.
Yeah but people will continue to be misinformed about dietary protein, and think eating fruits and vegetables is for wusses.
My dad is old and fat and is out of breath when he gets into a car. He eats cheap sometimes spoiled meat 3 times a day, everything he cooks is somehow the greasiest food i have ever seen.
I have a BMI of 21. I do an average of 18000 steps a day and mountain bike on the weekend.
Somehow he's embarrassed about my vegan diet and gives me tips on how to eat right and tells me that i'm godda die soon for the past 5 years.
I have many friends like that. Bro, i need that protein. You are overweight and you don't do any sports at all.
I dunno, i find it very odd.
From what I've seen its often just genuine ignorance. Thinking plants are entirely carbs, needing protein for muscle so of course you only get protein from animal muscle, and that old myth of incomplete proteins. Ill be honest I had the same assumption that something like a potato is entirely carbs
Do you have any recipes you can share? I'm vegan, but I think I'm not eating a balanced diet
Fruits and vegetables are (mostly) delicious.
So is a bacon cheeseburger.
People don't want to be vegan for a variety of issues.
My personal problem comes with things like not eating honey. Beekeepers keep bee populations healthy. Those bees pollinate the food vegans eat. But for some dumb ass reason vegans are against it.
I'm all for moving away from meat, but exclusion shouldn't be the focus. The majority of people will never convert to vegan diet, but we CAN get them to replace some of what they eat with vegetarian alternatives.
It is amazing how the focus shift from blaming gas and oil industries and focus on food. Blaming individuals, with a sub message ( you are the reason for climate change because you buy animal products) while big corporations and their investors, and ceos continue enjoying their massive wealth.
Disclaimer, didn't read the article but the title it triggering..
We also need to address fossil fuels, but the meat industry is large enough in emissions to make us miss climate targets even if fossil fuels were eliminated today
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
There's not really a way around consumption being reduced. It's going to be hard to implement any systematic solutions to reducing meat consumption if people don't take that step themselves too
But I should also point out that there's more to the environment than just climate change which is why I would suggest at least skimming things before commenting for the future. The article and even its title ("across a range of environmental measures") include much more than just greenhouse gas emissions.
on the environmental impact of their diets was assessed in relation to greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, water pollution risk and biodiversity loss.
[...]
The impacts of vegans were a quarter of those of high meat eaters for greenhouse gas emissions, and land use, just 27% of the impacts for water pollution, 46% for water use and 34% for biodiversity.
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
Many argue that this overlooks the large variation in the footprints of foods across the world. Using global averages might give us a misleading picture for some parts of the world or some producers. If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy. https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
There's a number more but this comment is already getting too long
One can fight oil and gas on a plant based diet just as well.
This is a simple choice each individual makes three times a day, what to eat.
Doesn't need political approval, doesn't need majorities, no investment and no infrastructure required. If you understand how serious the climate crisis is, eating plant based should come as a no brainer. And if you understand, you won't stop there.
It's still a systemic crisis which cannot be solved on the individual level, true. In an ideal world, plant based diets would become the norm through various means. But why wait for that if you understand it's the right thing to do?
industry serves people's demands. it's one way to influence agri industry.
Industry also drives people's demands fwiw, without lobbying, subsidy, advertising, and the cultural dominance of meat production those things have brought about, meat consumption wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today
There is simply too much in life to care about. And we all care about different things. And nobody can care about all the things that we should care about. Even more so when caring about a cause involves making sacrifices in order to support that cause.
So without systemic change, you will never convince a critical mass of individuals to care enough to sacrifice enough to make a meaningful difference.
So the focus on the individual as the unit of change is as good as saying "do nothing".
You're upset because you don't want to accept your piece of the pie when it comes to responsibility. This is childish.
The title should trigger you, but not too be upset with billionaires; although certainly you can be upset with them for their much larger pieces of the pie.
They don't just consume more, they spend a shit ton of money to make sure the working class consumes more too.
calling people childish doesn't change whether they're right.
✨it's both✨
Both are driven by corporations but both can also be impacted somewhat - both by reducing carbon and harming corporation's profits - with individual choice making. Both will also ultimately only be fully rectified by a new economic order.
Rather than looking it as shifting the blame, could you not see it as another way in which you can make an impact?
We are where we are and we collectively need to reduce our environmental impact. Being conscious of what you eat is one way to do that, if you want to help.
Yay,vegans role! 🌳💚
Why should humans be cruel without necessity?
Because tradition: see war, crime, reality TV
The only way to win this is with affordable traditional vegan options (the stuff our grandparents used to eat, but didn't call vegan), but with lettuce at the same price as pork and vegan cheese that is 50% fat and triple the price, most people who can't soak their own beans, many can't or have time to even cook, this is not going to work.
Yup. I have nothing against being Vegan and we have dramatically cut our meat... but Vegans act like it's easy. It's not... make it easier and not super expensive and I will go for it.
As is tradition, a paper proofs something that should be common sense and as is tradition too, it will likely be ignored. It's a sad world to live in.
I'm in my 40s and the "rah rah steak!" Folks are dying from cancer and illness. I had to reduce my meat intake.
My tin foil hat believes the lax US laws on meat means it's being pumped with some serious bad shit to keep meat prices from being so high compared to other countries. Not to mention our general health (and lack of affordable healthcare) means many more folks are succumbing to these illnesses.
The bad shit is the way cater is raised in the US. In france an exploitation with let's say 200 beast is considered big. In the us some count thousands... There are reaaly big one in europe but it's a minority compared to the us. This is atrocious and I really hope we all reduce our meat intake.
it’s being pumped with some serious bad shit
Quite literal, yes.
Jeez what a title. I bet most folks read the title and assume it means better for health reasons not environmental reasons.
It says environmental in the title?
Yes, but at the very end, and humans are unfortunately known to only half-dead titles and then run with it haha.
Good thing both of those conclusions are true.
I’m pretty sure I read a meta analysis that concluded that a little meat is better than no meat. But that hardly matters bc when you tell someone about paleo they end up shoveling chicken, beef, and dairy down their throat with little to no vegetables and fruits (I think from the same analysis)
Ohh, you've got proof a vegan diet is better for you? It's definitely something I've heard but I've never seen the proof.
I don't give two shits about enviornmental measures, how is it by dietary measures?
Oh, right:
"avoiding all animal foods may lead to nutritional deficiencies in vitamin B12, omega-3, calcium, zinc, iron, magnesium, and high-quality protein.
These deficiencies may be associated with increased risk for certain types of cancer, stroke, bone fractures, preterm birth, and failure to thrive. Avoiding consumption of animal-sourced food may also be related to higher rates of depression and anxiety. Hair loss, weak bones, muscle wasting, skin rashes, hypothyroidism, and anemia are other issues that have been observed in those strictly following a vegan diet."
Notice the may.
Eating animal foods is also linked to increased risk of certain types of cancer, stroke, etc. It's totally possible to avoid malnutrition even on a vegan diet. It just requires some consideration.
The full paper promotes a plant-forward diet supplemented with modest amounts of nose-to-tail animal consumption. Even this paper isn't promoting the rampant consumption of animal muscle typical of western diets.
Ever heard of supplements? And if you eat nuts and seeds you knock most pf what you listed out of your needs diet wise.
These articles are either aimed at college students, greatly misinformed, or shills for animal agriculture.--
As for the health aspects. For anyone with a genuine curiosity for an argument in good faith see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-019-0552-0
Jordan's statement on health is very misleading.
Even better results can be achieved by unaliving yourself.
Also in case anyone wanted to know without reading the paper they define "high" meat eaters as "(≥100 g d−1)" so I assume more then 100grams a day.
You know what does even better than unaliving yourself? Andreas Malming an oil pipeline.
I think this is the right attitude to have (even if the oil spill would be worse then the oil delivered), the idea that you should take personal responsibility for environmental impact just glosses over how something like 4/5ths of all pollution is caused by large corporations manly in heavy industry. I don't think this is a bad paper, just a bit thin on core work (it was all survey based, and assumes impact from other studies).
People should be aiming a bit higher to make the changes they are stating.
Your math is flawed:
A plant based diet reduces the impact by -3/4, your solution by -1
If i convince 4 others to do the same, or 8 to reduce it by half my impact is -3 not counting cascading effects.
That is if you would follow trough with your suggestion which I have doubts. So not only is your solution not better, it is worse and you don't act the way you propose.
But at what cost...?!?
That's the fun part. None, really. I still eat like a king, my meals might even be tastier nowadays.
I actually have no problems with vegans or vegetarians. If you're doing it for your own reasons that great. If you're yelling at me that "meat is murder and chicken eggs are rape" then you're a crazy person.
I just like the taste of meat, and the benefits of vegetarian or vegan diets are not worth the trouble right now. If plant alternatives price out eggs, then I'll switch. Until then, I'm just buying the best food I can afford.
Edit: fixed "have to problems" to "have no peoblems"
"veganism will not fix all of humanity's problems, but no solution will be complete without it."