What would happen if all Americans went vegan?
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
"researcher Mary Beth Hall began by estimating the impact of converting all land now used by the livestock industry to cropland for human food"
Why on earth would you do that? Livestock are much less efficient at using land than crops, in terms of how much land you need to produce a calorie. Furthermore, a HUGE percentage of our current crops are used to feed livestock. Without even Googleing it, the assumption should be that we would not use all pasture land for crop land. The total amount of land under crops might even go down under the vegan scenario, since eating the food directly would be more efficient.
Also:
"Burning the excess waste would add some 2 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, they estimate."
First off, is burning the most likely way this would be disposed of? Why not compost.
Second, crops are carbon neutral. They take CO2 from the atmosphere when growing, so how can they add CO2 to the atmosphere when burnt?
"Fertilizer demands would also go up while the supply of animal manure dwindled."
Again, only true if the amount of crops increased. I'm doubtful.
The points about nutrition are better made though. Animal products are rich in some minerals and vitamins that are sparse in a vegan diet. Not entirely missing, but sparse. But then that's why I'm not a vegan.
Maybe not wheat and such, but other, more hardy plants.
You can try to grow it, but good luck hauling the tractor, plow, and combine up that steep hill that only a sheep can traverse. It's not a matter of "can I grow corn in that soil?", as you can grow corn on a rock if you throw enough fertilizer at it. It's a matter of "can I grow corn at any kind of scale that doesn't involve tilling and harvesting by hand?" And for context, keep in mind that people are killed in tractor rollover events all the time as a result of trying to traverse an incline.
There might be something to be said about limiting confined animal production fed with our most fertile crop land, but the same arguments aren't relevant for all cattle production.
From an ecological perspective, you're not losing wild nature for agriculture, cattle are just displacing grazing animals which would have been there otherwise.
Her head of cattle to land ratio is some crazy number like 100 acres to a cow/calf pair. Could be less IDK exactly. Consequnetly she owns thousands of acres to feed her cattle.
There is not enough water there to irrigate non-native edible species over her thousands acre ranch. She'd drain every creek, stream, and river to make a farm happen there.
The health benefits of a whole food plant based diet are astonishing, and the whole missing vitamin mineral thing is trivially taken care of.
Becoming vegan will lead to immediate and long term health benefits. And from personal experience its much easier and more fun than you could dare to expect.
I don't disagree that theres a lot of room and a some benefits to reducing meat consumption. But I don't think that's the same as it being sensible for everyone to be vegan.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/wjqbem/judge-convicts...
Plant-only diet is terrible for humans just like a meat-only diet. The best diet for humans is a balanced diet.
Honestly curious - how is this fun? I try to eat less meat for a personal medical reason and finding non-meat dishes is a hassle, and at some restaurants it's impossible.
She cannot have carbs or sugars, but she needs certain kinds of meat like fish or chicken.
The only way to find this stuff out is to have detailed dietary analysis and bloodwork. You might be surprised what you find out about your own body.
That being said, yes eating nutritious plants is never a bad idea. Being vegan on the other hand, is probably overboard for 90% of humans.
No. The health benefits of a balanced diet is astonishing. Vegan diets are just as bad for humans as meatatarian diets.
> and the whole missing vitamin mineral thing is trivially taken care of.
It isn't.
> Becoming vegan will lead to immediate and long term health benefits.
No it won't. Having a balanced diet will. That's why all the oldest people are omnivores.
Humans are built to be omnivores.
A vegan diet is a terrible diet for humans. That's why it has to be augmented so much. The cult of veganism has to be countered just like any other cult.
>> and the whole missing vitamin mineral thing is trivially taken care of.
>It isn't.
I'm dead serious when I say that if you can demonstrate this, you'll be handed a PHd on a platter. Possibly a Nobel prize.
Get writing!
PS sorry can't resist, you'll get another Nobel for publishing how humans are 'built to be...'.
And the typical vegan diet is terrible. A whole food plant based diet is fundamentally different - they only share the fact that they are based on non animal products
> I'm dead serious when I say that if you can demonstrate this, you'll be handed a PHd on a platter. Possibly a Nobel prize.
Are you dead serious?
> PS sorry can't resist, you'll get another Nobel for publishing how humans are 'built to be...'.
Well considering we aren't obligate carnivores and we aren't obligate herbivores, I wonder what we are?
Eating meat, just like eating vegetables, fruits, etc made us who we are. We are actually built by our food consumption evolutionarily speaking.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16990.epdf
> And the typical vegan diet is terrible.
Yes. Because it's not ones humans are designed for.
> A whole food plant based diet is fundamentally different - they only share the fact that they are based on non animal products
Yikes. That just sounds like a rebranding of a terrible idea. Kind of like how "neo-nazis" rebranded to alt-right.
Balanced diet including meat, veggies, etc > vegan/whole food diet. Human society has proven this to be true. The dominant human society is the balanced diet society. No vegan society nor meat-only society truly exists.
My diet is rich in minimally processed foods like vegetables, fruit, flour I mill myself (I have a home mill), but also meat, egg, and dairy.
Liver is an amazing nutritionally dense food, and there's no benefit to not eating it. Eggs are great too. Fish are great. There's nothing wrong with red meat either in reasonable quantities.
All of which is saying that I see "vegan" as sort of orthogonal to dietary health. It includes things that are bad for you and excludes things that are good for you.
I can see some benefit of looking for the extreme though, it's looking for a theoretical optimum.
I'd have thought they could do studies of land use in India for the most extreme possible switch.
* Study authors are tied to dairy farming and, animal and poultry farming.
* America is never going to be a vegan, or even vegetarian nation. There are too many jobs tied up in fattening cattle and pigs to go that route.
* Americans manliness is tied up into how much they kill, it's not going to happen.
* There are some horrific oversights such as the fact that a large portion of our farming is already for animal feed. Something like 800 million people could be fed if we planted different crops instead of animal feed.
* There is literally no reason to go vegan instead of vegetarian for most people. Almost all the ethical reasons behind veganism can be routed around with minimal effort.
* As someone who eats a mostly vegan diet, the dietary concerns for the vast majority of people are nonsensical. Yes, of course there are exceptions to everything, but there are entire countries that are mostly vegan/vegetarian that don't have these issues. B vitamins and calcium? Has his person done zero research? Both are absurdly easy to obtain in vegan form in the local grocery store of most somewhat populated areas right now, if everyone was vegan these would be staple foods.
This is absolutely the worst kind of sensationalized junk science to once again discredit a lifestyle that affects no one negatively.
...began by estimating the impact of converting all land now used by the livestock industry to cropland for human food. That would increase the amount of agricultural waste—corn stalks, potato waste, and other inedibles now fed to livestock—and eliminate the animals that now eat much of it. Burning the excess waste would add some 2 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, they estimate. Fertilizer demands would also go up while the supply of animal manure dwindled. That would mean making more artificial fertilizer, adding another 23 million tons of carbon emissions per year.
Converting all the land used by livestock into cropland for human food? That seems highly unlikely, just based on my (admittedly grade school level) understanding of ecology. I'd expect moving humans lower on the food chain to reduce the overall amount of plant matter it takes to sustain them. So Id' expect you could probably let all the pasture land reforest, and then convert a portion of the land used for feed crops to human food, and let the rest reforest as well.
Burning all the by-products also seems drastic. I'm going to assume that an expert in agriculture would have a good reason to not even mention composting. But even without that, and even if other uses couldn't be found, you could at least turn them into a net carbon sink by burying them in a nice anaerobic landfill. And even without that, the apparent that feeding that stuff to cattle makes the carbon somehow disappear is bizarre. The vast majority of that carbon will still end up in the atmosphere, via the animal's lungs.
Their estimate of net fertilizer demands seems like it has just got to be based on some careful selection of the boundaries of the system they're considering. I grew up in corn and soybean country, so, while I'm not a farmer myself, I am well aware that it takes more than just manure to sufficiently fertilize the nation's feed crops. The enormous reduction in artificial fertilizer demand from reduced need for those feed crops has to be included in the formula if you want to get some accurate figures.
Not that there is a need to convert very much of that land to cropland - corn and wheat produce far more food per acre than livestock.
Most or all of that land would turn back into wilderness and we'd all die in car wrecks from the millions more deer crossing the roads.
I personally don't eat beef, and have ethical concerns about animal treatment in food production systems, but people whose only source of information is "Cowspiracy" badly overestimate how large a proportion of American GHG emissions stem from animal agriculture.
Hello? This is what composting is for - those materials could be turned back into the land, making for better producing land. This could make some of the pasture land that is no so great into better producing.
https://iapreview.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publica...
> Despite greater total availability of energy, a feasible solution could not be identified, meaning that the yearly nutrient requirements of the U.S. population could not be met under the defined constraints. Deficiencies in vitamins (A, D, E, B12, and choline) and minerals (Ca) were the primary cause of this infeasibility. Although eliminating animals from the food production system may seem advantageous based on surface-level comparisons of system energetics, a more comprehensive analysis of the food production system highlights the unique and essential role of livestock products in the food production system. This suggests that substantial gains in environmental impact could be made by simply reducing daily intake, rather than affecting dramatic shifts in consumption pattern.
Two animal scientists had a silly hypothesis "is it a good idea to remove all farm animals", and proved the answer to be no.
Too bad they don't provide access to these studies. To me it looks like they just left it at that, and didn't investigate any further, e. g. the question of how many farm animals could be removed while still meeting all dietary requirements.
I hope so, cause I'd love to go vegan for all the environmental reasons, but god damn do I love meat, and cooking is my primary hobby so I'm not willing to give up all the history of recipes surrounding meat. For now, buying local is my solution.
That would be the biggest hard no to veganism for me - lack of eggs. It's too critical for baking for me.
I wonder what we are missing in our crops that, if grown, would bridge this gap?
Instead, I think you just get divisive click bate. Vegans will click thinking, "damn right!" Non-vegans will likely ignore it, thinking, "okay loony."
I think a stronger argument would lead with a direct fact or point of alarm. For example, "every non-vegan is contributing <blah> to greenhouse gasses."
`Severe anemics might start having to carry blood packs? Schedule regular transfusions?`
It's kind of a silly question, regardless. If the whole of America went vegan at once, what would happen to the resulting last generations of overpopulation of meat and dairy cattle? Would their meat be harvested for other purposes or be allowed to rot once they died out?
There are so many variable points to even approach it hypothetically that it just gets ridiculous, and would contribute very little.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
> Vegans will click thinking, "damn right!" Non-vegans will likely ignore it, thinking, "okay loony."
The study that referred to in the article is displayed in a way that won't sit well with any vegan. Since we can't read the study, we don't know much more.
Are you new at HN? This is 80% of the comments in any thread on any topic that isn't Haskell or an undergraduate-level academic paper.
Did you notice that it says:
“Our logic was to start at the extreme scenario [and work backward from that],” says Robin White, the study’s lead author and an animal sciences researcher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. She and fellow animal sciences researcher Mary Beth Hall, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dairy Forage Research Center in Madison, began by estimating the impact of converting all land now used by the livestock industry to cropland for human food.
I think they taste fine, but the spouse gets super-squicked at just the thought of me eating them. Apparently, it's just fine if the turtle eats them. That's an unfair double-standard right there. We're both opportunistic omnivores, after all.
And the vegan police can't exactly stop me from throwing grain meal in a bucket and raising my own beetles, so the 100% vegan thing won't be happening anyway.
I'm not going to stop eating meat unless someone literally puts a gun in my face, and then I will start again right after the gun is out of my face, and the gun-pointer is done roasting in my buried Morlock3000(TM) barbecue. It's technically not cannibalism if I feed the unfortunate Eloi to carnivorous insects and then eat the bugs, right?~
You can't force people to stop eating meat, and the veganism ecological argument will never be convincing enough to get 100% acceptance. You get far more traction out of finding ways to make the existing lifestyle status quo less damaging to the ecosystem. So now you're back to reducing the impact of the global beef herd in ways that don't involve reducing it all the way down to zero head of cattle.
Wasn't so hard in the new Blade Runner
Protein is not the problem. Never has been. There are plenty of ways to get complete protein on a vegan diet.
But yes, there are often nutritional problems. My daughter tried really really hard to go vegan. She tried for a year and a half, doing all the right things, taking all the right supplements. She had to give it up. She started experiencing syncope (similar to a seizure) when falling asleep. Her LDL levels were too low. Her levels of various hormones were out of whack. Other essential nutrients were also low (we did blood testing to learn all of this). She now eats eggs, fish, and dairy, and takes fish oil. All her issues went away.
Some people have the genetic makeup to do well on a vegan diet. Many people do not, and no amount of supplementation will fix this.
Google for the many stories of ex-vegans whose experiences mirrored my daughter's. It's a difficult thing. I understand that many vegans are vegans for moral reasons, and it's very difficult to face the consequences of one's own genetic makeup. My daughter was angry at first, but has since come to peace with it.
This so called study is meaningless.