Vegetarian diets are not going to save the planet

TL;DR: Terrible article, I suggest not waste your time on it.

Why?

* Author writes """it’s more accurate to say that vegetarian diets are “less awful,” not “better,” than omnivorous diets""". He gives no hard numbers to back it up. Less awful IS OBVIOUSLY the same as better. According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact.

* He argues vegetarians eat more staples. And that they are usually grown as mono crops, thus bad for the environment. He forgets that animals slaughtered for meat have been eating staples all their lives. A large part of the staples are grown for life stock; this makes meat so inefficient in the first place. The author is seems to know that it is also grown for life stock, but then continues that vegetarians are responsible for the monocrop disaster. Clearly misguided he is.

* Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group. Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.

What I do agree on: eat with the seasons. But simple economics of "eat what is cheap" should help with that. It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.

What pulls customers? Cheap meat, and cheap beer. That's why there's always some meat on offer that costs less per kilo then bell peppers in the supermarkets near where I live.

If we want to save the planet from the rather imminent "mass extinction" (lets not call it "global warming" that sound waaay to nice), we should not optimize for consumerism but for sustainability. And meat eating is simply not sustainable.

I don't eat meat not to solve any sustainability problems. I don't eat meat because of how the meat industry is treating the animals and the nature (By the way, most soy and grain is produced to feat our animals). I can give you a lot of examples for the planned economized genocide on other races than humans. But people, like the author of this text, don't want to hear arguments or examples like that. They don't buy at the local market, they buy the cheapest meat at the supermarkets and care about their wallets more than they care about others. We totally lost the connection to the lives of the animals we eat. Additionally I don't eat meat because 80% of our antibiotics is produced to feat it to animals. Just Google MRSA and find out how much your government is doing about that issue. Some scientist, here in germany, call the resistance against antibiotics an equal threat to the mankind like nuclear weapons. This issue brings meat consumption and therefore the meat industry in a total different perspective.

I'm not sure what to make out of such a text.

Basically what the text says is that plant-based food usually is less resource intense and thus better for the environment, but there are also other factors and plant-based food production isn't perfect. (Independent of the question whether all the other things he says are true.)

So the headline is obviously strictly true, but highly misleading. A more accurate one would be "Vegetarian diets are good for the planet, but they're not the whole solution".

The article should be titled something more like 'Local, Seasonal Diets Are Going To Save The Planet'. It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons.

While I think the solutions presented in this article sound fantastic (in both senses of the word, unfortunately; it sounds way too ambitious to be realistic in the current political climate), the attack on vegetarianism is disingenuous.

As the article itself points out: "Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed". So that means that eating meat has the same devastating effect (but on a larger scale, because animals eat a lot) as its strawman vegetarian diet of wheat, corn, soy and rice.

Of course vegetarianism isn't magically going to solve all the world's problems, but all other things being equal, eating less meat will reduce your ecological footprint. There's a lot more you can do, but eating less meat is an easy first step.

Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples the article just basically says:

- buy local

- eat with the seasons

- many small local farms are better than few big (remote)

- there's need for a better market for those small farms

Is it just me not getting what this has to do with the cons of "vegetarian diets"? At least where I live eating meat isn't a sign for any of those points.

Although I'm a sarcastic person myself, this anti-hippie rhetoric is completely self-defeating. While I get the environmental and economic benefits of the "eat local" ideology, the consequences for our menu appear (at least to me) more hippie-like than not eating meat. But maybe this is just my opinion living in the North German Plain not wanting to eat rutabaga the whole winter.

>Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed and fuel;

Exactly. So why should eating less of the same food than is necessary to produce a substantially smaller amount of meat be discouraged? Using less resources overall is still better, right?

edit: formatting

Most of the arguments are just an appeal to nature. Doesn't address cow burps as a major source of pollution. Seems to be making a food miles argument, when what matters is carbon per pound of food. Transporting by boat is highly efficient and a high percentage of the cargo is food. Driving to pick up your food from 3 farmer's markets can create more pollution than would be used to transport them from across the world, because the food is such a small percentage of the weight of your car.

The title should really be "Vegetarian diets alone are not going to save the planet".

> Unfortunately, most food plants in this country are grown in resource-intensive systems that groan under the weight of a relentlessly demanding global consumer,

Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms more resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?

I think it entirely depends on the timescale. I like to imagine a distant future where all food production is automated. Staples, vegetables, and fruits (and fresh water) would be available to everyone for free. People wouldn't eat meat because of the environment. People wouldn't grow up eating meat, so eating a cow would be just as repulsive as eating a cat or a dog. It wouldn't even be a temptation.

> They’re so large, astronauts can see entire sections of the planet turn brown and die every Spring as farmers nuke the soil’s native biology to make way for the artificially imposed order of the grain field.

I don't know what to make of "artificially imposed order of the grain field." People have been artificially imposing order on the earth for thousands of years. Granted, it's on a much bigger scale today. Still, how do you propose feeding the earth without any artificial order?

In this future world, all of the machinery will run on solar and wind power. We will grow genetically modified crops so that we only need to use a small amount of pesticides and fertilizers. And just like all plants, these crops will absorb a lot of carbon dioxide and release a lot of oxygen.

I mean, even if this is still bad for the environment, would there even be any room for improvement? The only thing I can think of is somehow reducing the human population. That's a prickly subject.

And we're going to really have to think about all of this before we defeat aging.

Founder of Eaternity here. Putting facts to the issue, we have collected the largest database to calculate the CO₂ emissions for food - and it is freely available: www.eaternity.org

The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet - this is clickbait/trolling. I'm a vegetarian and make no claim that being so is going to save the planet - it would help if we all were but it's definitely not a silver bullet.

This article is long on assertions and devoid of facts. It is junk. To the author: post again when you can back up your statements.

The author's agenda is showing.

> Note: everything written from here on is from the “local” perspective of a Virginian

Then why talk about the planet.

I am still not convinced that local anything is more eco/carbon friendly. Think the Law of Comparative Advantages - in certain areas my lunch will be way more eco/carbon friendly if I only spend the whole day producing guns instead of butter. Also I suspect that huge farms employing high end software, hardware and even weather prediction technology are more eco/carbon friendly than any local farmer can ever be.

Quality of the article aside, local agriculture is usually worse environmentally due to its smaller size: http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local...

The author's very excited about urban gardens, but have we gotten anywhere close to cleaning up our cities well enough that we can grow food there without swallowing a bunch of lead in the process?

This article reminds me of a previous one from a few months ago that talked about where the produce in Chinatown comes from (local, small growers rather than large industrial operations).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981063

TL;DR: Try Vegan/Vegetarian diets and buy local to have the best sustainable diet. Also, bring your own hand-knitted bags to buy food at the farmers market.

i was in NYC for work during the holidays, etsy had a pop up exchange in Chelsea market and it was absolutely nuts. After seeing it, the need to create a food market to connect, and incentivize, local producers and consumers was obviously apparent.

I think garden tech is a wide open space with room for even small application of tech mentality to have a huge impact on yield

I'm the author. Ho boy. Just a few clarifications based on things I'm seeing here:

"a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact."

I agree. Nowhere did I contradict this.

"He argues vegetarians eat more staples."

No, I argue that the most vegetarian diets are composed primarily of staples. Subtle but extremely important distinction.

"Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group."

I dug my own grave here. Had no idea this article would go viral. Oops.

"meat eating is simply not sustainable"

Correct; CAFO industrial meat that's eaten without an ear toward seasonality or ecological propriety is pure hell. However, sustainable food production systems will rely on modeling natural patterns (which is the opposite of what nearly all farms today do), and that will rely heavily on animals - though far, far, FAR fewer of them - for mineral cycling and fertility, as do nearly all native ecosystems. I don't have the space here to talk about fertility via animals vs nitrogenous covers; may address that in a later article.

"Cowspiracy"

This movie is directed at the industrial meat supply chain: the land-expansive background farms that feed CAFOs and the CAFOs themselves. I advocate for neither.

"The author is also playing the false dichotomy vegetarian <-> omnivorous"

There is an entire paragraph in my article where I explain that not all vegetarian diets, and not all omnivorous diets, are created equal.

"Had the author consulted the literature, he'd know that the environmental credentials of grass-fed beef are extremely suspect; some studies suggest that the carbon footprint is actually greater than intensive feedlot beef and the land use is absolutely vast. He'd know that only a handful of animal sources of protein have equivalent CO2 emissions to plant sources - intensively reared poultry, eggs and some inshore seafoods."

The increased carbon footprint of grass-finished beef is based on grass finished beef living longer than grain finished beef because they take longer to finish. The studies I've seen regarding grass/grain cattle emissions are limited to examination of lifetime carbon output directly from the cow through expiration. They do not examine 1.) the sequestration of carbon into soil built by ecologically managed, rotationally-grazed herds, 2.) the carbon output of CAFO manure lagoons, 3.) the carbon footprint of the grains fed to CAFO animals. In short, the studies do not address the net carbon effect of the entire system, and they only address the two "traditional" methods of raising cattle, neither of which I endorse.

"He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint-wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one."

Not quite. I said it's POSSIBLE for a fully vegetarian diet to be worse, footprint wise, than a plant-centric omnivorous one. I.e. there is no deterministic link between vegetarian diets and sustainability.

"Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples"

Again, I make no claims about who eats the most staples. I make a claim that the most vegetarian diets are principally composed of staples.

"It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons."

Absolutely correct. I had to choose between an accurate title that almost no one would read, or a caustic one that would stimulate debate and get me yelled at. And so here we are :-)

"The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet"

As stated in the first sentence, this article was prompted by a slew of responses from vegetarians to my previous article about organic agriculture, nearly all of whom argued that the "simple" solution to food sustainability was to switch to a vegetarian diet.

"Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms more resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?"

Yes. However, I'm advocating a form of agriculture that doesn't exist yet.

> On the east coast, the solution is large numbers of smaller (50–500 acres) cultivated food forests surrounding our urban centers, forming the backbone of a production system augmented by urban gardens growing on nearly every rooftop, balcony, vacant lot, road median, yard, public park, and empty warehouse floor. The solution involves brick & mortar markets and food hubs being supplanted by producer/consumer exchanges* that allow computers to handle the aggregating without obscuring the relationship between grower and eater.

I am suspicious of this - especially the part about rooftop gardens. I remember someone telling me that small gardens are quite carbon intensive because they don't get the economies of scale that large farm operations do. Can anyone confirm that? Do permaculture farms get economies of scale?

The true solution is very, very simple. A crippling carbon tax. It needs to be large enough that it becomes unprofitable to have tomatoes in winter, and for food to travel long distances.* We don't necessarily need to buy directly from directly from producers if middlemen supermarkets can transport food efficiently.

Perhaps such a heavy carbon tax would force supermarket chains to downsize and source more food locally and in season, but the real optimisations would come from the things we haven't thought of yet. Every business would be looking to for ways to cut their carbon costs, necessity is the mother of invention of course. This would require a huge restructuring of the world economy. That's possible, just a hard sell - think how much the world economy changed during WW2.

I've been in a pretty apocalyptic kind of mood lately (feeling my vibe? F#A#∞ is a great album to day dream this stuff to.). Melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska will cause a a vicious circle of carbon being released, further warming temperatures. Political action is the only thing that can stop climate change and with the way Trumps first week has gone, my hopes for that are the bleakest they've ever been. Are we past the tipping point? I'm kind of wondering if we should just give up and use the rest of our oil to move people away from coastal areas. Perhaps militarisation of national borders is the logical thing to do to prepare for waves of climate refugees that can't be supported (that's a very, very sad thought). Will starving nations resort to nuclear war? What do people here think?

* Worried about how the poor would handle such a rise in food costs? You should be. I imagine the bulk of the tax would need to be transferred to the poor, as they spend the largest proportion of the income on basic necessities caused by a heavy carbon tax. On a global scale, a heavy carbon tax would need to result in large transfers from the developed nations to the underdeveloped. A political pipe dream...

The vegan nonsensealists perhaps should consider the role of hunting and animal husbandry in the ability of humans to inhabit northern and semidesert regions of the planet and to sustain a population. It is also good idea to read about the causes of malnutrition in poor communities.